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Pity the monsters

Richard Altick, 18 December 1980

The Elephant Man 
by Bernard Pomerance.
Faber, 71 pp., £2.25, June 1980, 0 571 11569 1
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The Elephant Man: the Book of the Film 
by Joy Kuhn.
Virgin, 90 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 9780907080091
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The Elephant Man 
by Christine Sparks.
Futura, 272 pp., £1.25, August 1980, 0 7088 1942 7
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The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences 
by Frederick Treves.
Star, 126 pp., £95, August 1980, 0 352 30747 1
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The Elephant Man and Other Freaks 
by Sian Richards.
Futura, 197 pp., £1.25, October 1980, 0 7088 1927 3
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The True History of the Elephant Man 
by Michael Howell and Peter Ford.
Allison and Busby, 190 pp., £6.95, March 1980, 0 85031 353 8
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... appendicitis on which depended the life of the man who was about to become King of England, but Edward and Alexandra had long been patrons of the London Hospital and this up-and-coming doctor would have come to their notice without the Elephant Man. If he continued to build up a lucrative Wimpole Street practice, it was because he was a notably skilled ...

Superior Persons

E.S. Turner, 6 February 1986

Travels with a Superior Person 
by Lord Curzon, edited by Peter King.
Sidgwick, 191 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 283 99294 8
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The Ladies of Castlebrae 
by A. Whigham Price.
Alan Sutton, 242 pp., £10.95, October 1985, 0 86299 228 1
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Lizzie: A Victorian Lady’s Amazon Adventure 
by Tony Morrison, Anne Brown and Ann Rose.
BBC, 160 pp., £9.95, November 1985, 0 563 20424 9
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Miss Fane in India 
by [author], edited by John Pemble.
Alan Sutton, 246 pp., £10.95, October 1985, 0 86299 240 0
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Explorers Extraordinary 
by John Keay.
Murray/BBC Publications, 195 pp., £10.95, November 1985, 0 7195 4249 9
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A Visit to Germany, Italy and Malta 1840-41 
by Hans Christian Andersen, translated by Grace Thornton.
Peter Owen, 182 pp., £12.50, October 1985, 0 7206 0636 5
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The Irish Sketch-Book 1842 
by William Makepeace Thackeray.
Blackstaff, 368 pp., £9.95, December 1985, 0 85640 340 7
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Mr Rowlandson’s England 
by Robert Southey, edited by John Steel.
Antique Collectors’ Club, 202 pp., £14.95, November 1985, 0 907462 77 4
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... some engaging pictures of potentates, not all trustworthy-looking. But do we need a portrait of Edward VII just because he sat on the platform at a Curzon lecture? The Ladies of Castlebrae is a saga of learned frumps triumphant. It describes how wealthy twin sisters from Ayrshire, blue-stockings who in fact wore white stockings, travelled to St ...

Back to the Border

Niamh Gallagher: Ulsterism, 17 June 2021

The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925 
by Charles Townshend.
Allen Lane, 368 pp., £20, April, 978 0 241 30086 2
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... across the UK were predominantly a result of rural-urban divides.Townshend refers to the work of Thomas Macknight, a journalist often credited with pioneering the ‘two nations theory’ – in which Ulster Protestants form their own distinct nation on the island of Ireland. He doesn’t mention W.F. Moneypenny’s The Two Irish Nations: An Essay on Home ...

Whack-a-Mole

Rivka Galchen: Anti-Vax Sentiments, 27 January 2022

Stuck: How Vaccine Rumours Start – and Why They Don’t Go Away 
by Heidi Larson.
Oxford, 157 pp., £18.99, September 2020, 978 0 19 007724 2
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Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement 
by Jonathan Berman.
MIT, 277 pp., £25, September 2020, 978 0 262 53932 6
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... and inflammation of the infected arm. But they didn’t contract smallpox.Two decades later, Edward Jenner, a doctor and fellow of the Royal Society, went a step further. He infected a young boy with cowpox and then, two months later, with smallpox (a questionable approach, but Jenner had himself been inoculated as a child). The boy had a fever from the ...

Little Lame Balloonman

August Kleinzahler: E.E. Cummings, 9 October 2014

E.E. Cummings: The Complete Poems, 1904-62 
edited by George James Firmage.
Liveright, 1102 pp., £36, September 2013, 978 0 87140 710 8
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E.E. Cummings: A Life 
by Susan Cheever.
Pantheon, 209 pp., £16, February 2014, 978 0 307 37997 9
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... Moore who sang his praises, but other, very different kinds of poet too: Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of Cummings’s style ...

Seen through the Loopholes

David Simpson: ‘War at a Distance’, 11 March 2010

War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime 
by Mary Favret.
Princeton, 262 pp., £18.95, January 2010, 978 0 691 14407 8
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... in its everyday susceptibility to invasion by outside forces. Cowper, like Mansfield Park after Edward Said’s reading and Patricia Rozema’s movie, will never be the same again, and we will wonder why we never saw him this way before. Some of the best parts of Favret’s book are about the pervasive metaphorisation of military violence in the vocabulary ...

Writing French in English

Helen Cooper: Chaucer’s Language, 7 October 2010

The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War 
by Ardis Butterfield.
Oxford, 444 pp., £60, December 2009, 978 0 19 957486 5
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... of the earliest literature in French was written in England, including some of the most famous: Thomas of Britain’s Tristan, and, very possibly, the lais of Marie de France. More was written under the broad aegis of the Angevin courts, of Henry II and the various powerful women connected with him (his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, her daughter Marie de ...

Through Trychay’s Eyes

Patrick Collinson: Reformation and rebellion, 25 April 2002

The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village 
by Eamon Duffy.
Yale, 232 pp., £16.95, August 2001, 0 300 09185 0
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... anything to the exalting or setting forth . . . of images, or any such superstition,’ Thomas Cromwell’s Injunctions of that year insisted, ‘ye shall now openly afore the same recant and reprove the same.’ From mid-September 1538 Morebath obediently and completely abandoned the active promotion of the cult of the saints which had until then ...

How to Hate Oil

Edmund Gordon: On Upton Sinclair, 4 January 2024

Oil! 
by Upton Sinclair.
Penguin, 572 pp., £15.99, January, 978 0 14 313744 3
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... to change all that. It follows the career of a character closely modelled on the oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny, as seen from the perspective of his son. Doheny did more than anyone to usher in global petroleum dependency. In 1892 he drilled the first oil well in Los Angeles. The crude oil he found there was too viscous to be turned into kerosene ...

Shakespeares

David Norbrook, 18 July 1985

Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism 
edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield.
Manchester, 244 pp., £19.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1752 1
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Alternative Shakespeares 
edited by John Drakakis.
Methuen, 252 pp., £10.50, July 1985, 0 416 36850 6
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Shakespeare and Others 
by S. Schoenbaum.
Scolar, 285 pp., £25, May 1985, 0 85967 691 9
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Illustrations of the English Stage 1580-1642 
by R.A. Foakes.
Scolar, 180 pp., £35, February 1985, 0 85967 684 6
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Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ 
by E.A.J. Honigmann.
Manchester, 172 pp., £17.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1743 2
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... religion was an instrument of political domination – could serve the English state overseas. Thomas Harriot, a dangerous atheist at home, could use his ‘Machiavellian’ insights to show the Virginian settlers that the Indians could be cowed not only by direct force but by the power of their own imaginations, by myths such as the nightmarish notion ...

Middle Positions

John Hedley Brooke, 21 July 1983

Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London 1850-1875 
by Adrian Desmond.
Blond and Briggs, 287 pp., £15.95, October 1982, 0 85634 121 5
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Evolution without Evidence: Charles Darwin and ‘The Origin Species’ 
by Barry Gale.
Harvester, 238 pp., £18.95, January 1983, 0 7108 0442 3
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The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography 
by Janet Browne.
Yale, 273 pp., £21, May 1983, 0 300 02460 6
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The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinsm 
by Brain Leith.
Collins, 174 pp., £7.95, December 1982, 0 00 219548 8
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... reductionism which popular works on the historiography of science have done little to discourage. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions envisaged competition between two rival and incommensurable ‘paradigms’ as the hallmark of a revolutionary period. A greater theoretical diversity and the science had to be regarded as immature and ...

Let us breakfast in splendour

Charles Nicholl: Francis Barber, 16 July 2015

The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir 
by Michael Bundock.
Yale, 282 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 300 20710 1
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... Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the ...

Something for Theresa May to think about

John Barrell: The Bow Street Runners, 7 June 2012

The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750-1840 
by J.M. Beattie.
Oxford, 272 pp., £65, February 2012, 978 0 19 969516 4
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... 1794 the runners were working for the Home Office, employed in the surveillance of radicals. When Thomas Hardy, secretary of the London Corresponding Society, was arrested prior to his trial (and eventual acquittal) for high treason, among those who came for him, at six in the morning when he and his wife were asleep, were the two most high-profile runners in ...

I, Lowborn Cur

Colin Burrow: Literary Names, 22 November 2012

Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature 
by Alastair Fowler.
Oxford, 283 pp., £19.99, September 2012, 978 0 19 959222 7
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... Wooster, audibly something of a waster, has a first name which associates him with the womanising Edward VII, but with that surname, a cockerel with a weak r, a Wooster trying to be a Rooster, he could never hope to be a hit with the ladies. As for his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle (whose name suggests Wodehouse learned a trick or two from Evelyn Waugh, for whom ...

We are our apps

Hal Foster: Visual Revolutions, 5 October 2023

Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle 
by Jonathan Crary.
Zone, 262 pp., £25, October, 978 1 942130 85 7
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... by the resurgent Marxism and feminism of the 1960s, engaged scholars including T.J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock asked difficult questions about class, audience, gender and sexuality, questions that were soon rumbling through other fields as well. Yet disruptive though these inquiries were, they mostly continued to insist on ...

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