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Highbrow Mother Goose

Colin Kidd: Constitutional Dramas, 22 February 2024

The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom 
edited by Peter Cane and Harshan Kumarasingham.
Cambridge, 1178 pp., £160, August 2023, 978 1 108 47421 4
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... From the 1970s early modern revisionists such as Conrad Russell and John Morrill showed that the English Civil War did not arise out of a long-running constitutional dispute centred on the rise of Parliament. Parliaments (the plural is significant) served as points of contact between the centre and the counties and were largely dominated by humdrum local ...

Suspicious

Tariq Ali: Richard Sorge’s Fate, 21 November 2019

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent 
by Owen Matthews.
Bloomsbury, 448 pp., £25, March 2019, 978 1 4088 5778 6
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... The​ skills of the three top Soviet spies of the 20th century – Richard Sorge, Leopold Trepper and Ignace Poretsky/Reiss (better known as Ludwik) – remain unmatched. Sorge has always attracted particular attention. Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur ...

Intellectual Liberation

Blair Worden, 21 January 1988

Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans 
by Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Secker, 317 pp., £17.50, November 1987, 0 436 42512 2
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Archbishop William Laud 
by Charles Carlton.
Routledge, 272 pp., £25, December 1987, 0 7102 0463 9
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Clarendon and his Friends 
by Richard Ollard.
Hamish Hamilton, 367 pp., £15, September 1987, 0 241 12380 1
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Anti-Calvinists 
by Nicholas Tyacke.
Oxford, 305 pp., £30, February 1987, 0 19 822939 9
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Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I 
by Kevin Sharpe.
Cambridge, 309 pp., £27.50, December 1987, 0 521 34239 2
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... politically Whig (or SDP, or at least bien-pensant), nonetheless regard the inherited version of English history as a conspiracy wrought by a long line of Whig (and Protestant) writers. Products of a period of national decline, they are puzzled by the idea of progress and unimpressed by the evolution and the uniqueness of Britain’s ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, 30 November 2017

Murder on the Orient Express 
directed by Kenneth Brannagh.
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... a play, and a lot of short stories. We can add that he is Belgian, a masterful mangler of the English language, always right, generally insufferable. Finney and Ustinov easily top the charts for the insufferable aspect, and Suchet is surely the most memorable and interesting incarnation, in part because he played the role on television for so long (from ...

Short Cuts

Daniel Soar: The Bourne Analogy, 30 June 2011

... someone is filled with anger we can say – or we could say, if we spoke in the language of 1980s English-teaching textbooks – that their blood boils and they have to let off steam before they flip their lid. The assumption is that conceptual metaphors like this reflect and constrain a person’s way of thinking. It’s all a great game, and the spy ...

Odd Union

David Cannadine, 20 October 1994

Mrs Jordan’s Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 415 pp., £18, October 1994, 0 670 84159 5
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... and Barbara Cartland. Yet from the Restoration in 1660 until the early 20th century, the only English monarch who was both male and monogamous was probably King George III. Put the other way, this means that from Nell Gwyn to Mrs Keppel (and beyond), the courtesan was an integral part of royal history. But while much is known about such women as the ...

The Limit

Rosemary Hill, 2 November 1995

Christopher Wood: An English Painter 
by Richard Ingleby.
Allison and Busby, 295 pp., £25, May 1995, 0 85031 849 1
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Barbara Hepworth: A Life of Forms 
by Sally Festing.
Viking, 343 pp., £20, May 1995, 0 670 84203 6
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... explained to his mother. What he did not tell her was how he had landed such a grand invitation. Richard Ingleby cannot tell us either, but Kahn was the first of many men and women to be charmed by Wood. His good looks and ‘friendliness’, the quality that people singled out as the key to his appeal, enabled him to drift with apparent inevitability to the ...

Bees in a Deserted Hive

Daniel Soar: Nikolai Gumilev, 27 April 2000

The Pillar of Fire 
by Nikolai Gumilev, translated by Richard McKane.
Anvil, 252 pp., £12.95, August 1999, 0 85646 310 8
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... century the influence of Western European literature, much of it translated at two removes, from English into French into Russian, was strongly felt, after the fact. The first major craze was sentimentalism, sparked off by Karamzin’s imitations of late 18th-century French romances. Byronism came next, fuelled by Pushkin and Lermontov, with their ...

Active, Passive, or Dead?

Martin Loughlin: Sovereignty, 16 June 2016

The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy 
by Richard Tuck.
Cambridge, 295 pp., £17.99, February 2016, 978 1 107 57058 0
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... sovereignty is absolute, perpetual and indivisible; to divide or share it is to destroy it. Richard Tuck’s new book, based on the Seeley Lectures he delivered at Cambridge in 2012, was conceived long before the EU referendum was tabled. But although he doesn’t engage with the present debate, he does identify the correct method of trying to resolve ...

The Meaninglessness of Meaning

Michael Wood, 9 October 1986

The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980 
by Roland Barthes, translated by Linda Coverdale.
Cape, 368 pp., £25, October 1985, 0 224 02302 0
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Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology 
by Roland Barthes, translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith.
Cape, 172 pp., £8.95, September 1984, 0 224 02267 9
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The Fashion System 
by Roland Barthes, translated by Matthew Ward and Richard Howard.
Cape, 303 pp., £15, March 1985, 0 224 02984 3
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The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation 
by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard.
Blackwell, 312 pp., £19.50, January 1986, 0 631 14746 2
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The Rustle of Language 
by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard.
Blackwell, 373 pp., £27.50, May 1986, 0 631 14864 7
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A Barthes Reader 
edited by Susan Sontag.
Cape, 495 pp., £15, September 1982, 0 224 02946 0
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Barthes: Selected Writings 
edited by Susan Sontag.
Fontana, 495 pp., £4.95, August 1983, 0 00 636645 7
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Roland Barthes: A Conservative Estimate 
by Philip Thody.
University of Chicago Press, 203 pp., £6.75, February 1984, 0 226 79513 6
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Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After 
by Annette Lavers.
Methuen, 300 pp., £16.95, September 1982, 0 416 72380 2
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Barthes 
by Jonathan Culler.
Fontana, 128 pp., £1.95, February 1983, 0 00 635974 4
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... with an afterword. Having struggled throughout the earlier edition to translate Barthes into an English critical idiom, helped by much good will and intelligence, hampered by a bewildered sense of how much he was losing in the process, Thody now memorably says that Barthes has taught him to be ‘more suspicious of the idea of tolerance’ and less ...

On the imagining of conspiracy

Christopher Hitchens, 7 November 1991

Harlot’s Ghost 
by Norman Mailer.
Joseph, 1122 pp., £15.99, October 1991, 0 7181 2934 2
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A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs 
by Theodore Draper.
Hill and Wang, 690 pp., $27.95, June 1991, 0 8090 9613 7
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... down in the light of broad day. His assassin was murdered on camera while in maximum security. Richard Nixon’s intimates fed high-denomination dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank ...

Something an academic might experience

Michael Neve, 26 September 1991

The Faber Book of Madness 
edited by Roy Porter.
Faber, 572 pp., £14.99, September 1991, 0 571 14387 3
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... that French historians can only theorise about. He has travelled from writing about 18th-century English geology, English 18th-century social history, the social history of medicine and science, to madness and to books about madness. Porter (once again, the surnames have it) is the kind of historian whom librarians ...

Who is Stewart Home?

Iain Sinclair, 23 June 1994

... shadows and onto the platform. At 32, the former boot boy was a man among men. Or, that’s how Richard Allen might choose to break in a new face in one of his New English Library Skinhead shockers. It’s an Allen pulp hologram that Stewart Home is impersonating. But impersonation is too weak a term for this stranglehold ...

Cushy Numbers

Neal Ascherson, 3 November 1983

French and Germans, Germans and French: A Personal Interpretation of France under Two Occupations, 1914-1918/1940-1944 
by Richard Cobb.
University Press of New England, 188 pp., £10.95, July 1983, 0 87451 225 5
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Still Life: Scenes from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood 
by Richard Cobb.
Chatto, 161 pp., £8.95, September 1983, 0 7011 2695 7
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... novelists but who is also a pitiless judge when it comes to evil. But evil is not a category for Richard Cobb. He recognises naughtiness and nastiness, vanity, callousness, lust for blood, but – like a French Impressionist – utter black is not a colour for him. Cobb is most moving and persuasive when he speaks of women and fugitives. ‘A deserter cannot ...

Dazed and Confused

Paul Laity: Are the English human?, 28 November 2002

Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 
by Richard Weight.
Macmillan, 866 pp., £25, May 2002, 0 333 73462 9
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Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom 
by Tom Nairn.
Verso, 176 pp., £13, September 2002, 1 85984 657 2
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Identity of England 
by Robert Colls.
Oxford, 422 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 19 924519 3
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Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, October 2002, 1 85619 716 6
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... recording of ‘God Save the King’ and other patriotic anthems. ‘Not surprisingly’, Richard Weight remarks in Patriots, the convoy ‘got a muted reception when it parked in the ruins of Berlin’. In France, the bus crews were treated to mayoral banquets, only for their leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to ...

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