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Red Power

Thomas Meaney: Indigenous Political Strategies, 18 July 2024

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
by Pekka Hämäläinen.
Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7
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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History 
by Ned Blackhawk.
Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2
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Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance 
by Nick Estes.
Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6
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... the American colonials, the Indians were, as the historian Colin Calloway has put it, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, ‘the vicious pawns of a tyrannical king’. From the perspective of Westminster, the colonials were ungrateful rogue subjects who provoked needless border clashes that strained the Treasury, which had already been exhausted on their behalf in ...

Back from the Underworld

Marina Warner: The Liveliness of the Dead, 17 August 2017

The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains 
by Thomas Laqueur.
Princeton, 711 pp., £27.95, October 2015, 978 0 691 15778 8
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... presence in the world didn’t dim.Secularism, reason, scepticism don’t bring disenchantment, Thomas Laqueur argues in this monumental study, the harvest of more than ten years’ concentrated exploring of archives, tombstones, battlefields and furnace design. Laqueur principally scrutinises developments since around 1700, mostly in England, but he places ...

Joining them

Conrad Russell, 24 January 1985

Goodwin Wharton 
by J. Kent Clark.
Oxford, 408 pp., £15, November 1984, 0 19 212234 7
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Witchcraft and Religion 
by Christina Larner.
Blackwell, 184 pp., October 1984, 0 631 13447 6
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Lordship to Patronage: Scotland 1603-1745 
by Rosalind Mitchison.
Arnold, 198 pp., £5.95, November 1983, 0 7131 6313 5
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... She was suspicious of ‘stress’ explanations of witchcraft cases, and rightly doubtful of the Thomas-Macfarlane thesis of the disappearance of a good-neighbourly ethic. This disappearance, like the rise of the middle classes, has been credited to so many periods that it cannot be right for them all. I read a piece, many years ago, which dated it to the ...

Old Stragers

Pat Rogers, 7 May 1981

The Garrick Stage: Theatres and Audience in the 18th Century 
by Allardyce Nicoll.
Manchester, 192 pp., £14.50, April 1980, 0 7190 0768 2
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The Kemble Era: John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons and the London Stage 
by Linda Kelly.
Bodley Head, 221 pp., £8.50, April 1980, 0 370 10466 8
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Early English Stages 1300 to 1660: Vol. 3: Plays and their Makers to 1576 
by Glynne Wickham.
Routledge, 357 pp., £14.50, April 1981, 0 7100 0218 1
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... as group biography, since the principals have to share top billing with Mrs Inchbald, Sheridan, Thomas Lawrence and Mrs Jordan. There is a curious line of contact between several of these figures: four of them were the subjects of biographies by James Boaden (1762-1839), who happened also to edit Garrick’s letters. Ms Kelly mentions these lives in her ...

Towards the Transhuman

James Atlas, 2 February 1984

The Oxford Companion to American Literature 
by James Hart.
Oxford, 896 pp., £27.50, November 1983, 0 19 503074 5
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The Modern American Novel 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Oxford, 209 pp., £9.95, April 1983, 0 19 212591 5
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The Literature of the United States 
by Marshall Walker.
Macmillan, 236 pp., £14, November 1983, 0 333 32298 3
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American Fictions 1940-1980: A Comprehensive History and Critical Valuation 
by Frederick Karl.
Harper and Row, 637 pp., £31.50, February 1984, 0 06 014939 6
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Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism 
by John Updike.
Deutsch, 919 pp., £21, January 1984, 0 233 97610 8
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... authors and titles with events (Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone the same year that Henry James published Roderick Hudson; Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems coincided with Coca-Cola’s adoption of its ‘distinctly shaped bottle’). Still, naturalists have their molluscs, entomologists their butterflies: why shouldn’t literary critics indulge ...

Sahib and Son

J.I.M. Stewart, 22 December 1983

‘Oh Beloved Kids’: Rudyard Kipling’s Letters to his Children 
edited by Elliot Gilbert.
Weidenfeld, 225 pp., £10.95, October 1983, 0 297 78296 7
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... counting each day to the hols, Ever your lovingest, Pater’; ‘Your next letter must be care of Thomas Cook – Son, Cairo. Please let it be a full one. You don’t know how one hungers for news of people one loves.’ Of the two deeply loved children, Elsie, the less obsessively cherished, was perhaps the more responsive, standing in for her brother when ...

Priapus Knight

Marilyn Butler, 18 March 1982

The Arrogant Connoisseur: Richard Payne Knight 1751-1824 
edited by Michael Clarke and Nicholas Penny.
Manchester, 189 pp., £30, February 1982, 0 7190 0871 9
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... militantly committed to publicising the emblems of primitive religion. The rich but unintellectual Henry Blundell of Ince Blundell in Lancashire had a statue which had attracted d’Hancarville’s admiring notice, of a reclining hermaphrodite with infants at the breasts. Blundell heretically declared it unnatural and took a short way to putting matters ...

Leave me my illusions

Nicholas Penny: Antiquarianism, 29 July 2021

Time’s Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism 
by Rosemary Hill.
Allen Lane, 390 pp., £25, June, 978 1 84614 312 0
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... before proceeding to John Selden (1584-1654) and William Dugdale (1605-86), and on to Thomas Hearne (1678-1735). Hearne was a quarrelsome man, sacked from his job in the Bodleian Library for his Jacobite sympathies. Pope devoted five lethal lines to him in the third book of The Dunciad, adopting Chaucerian English for his purpose: ‘But who is ...

All the Assujettissement

Fergus McGhee: Mr Mid-Victorian Doubt, 18 November 2021

Arthur Hugh Clough 
edited by Gregory Tate.
Oxford, 384 pp., £85, September 2020, 978 0 19 881343 9
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... of the truth.’ As one of Clough’s most sympathetic 19th-century readers, the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, observed, he was a man who would neither ‘heartily accept mundane conditions and pursue the objects of ordinary mankind’ nor ‘reject them as a devotee of something definite’. The poems themselves are persistently drawn into this ...

The Style It Takes

Mark Ford: John Cale, 16 September 1999

What’s Welsh for Zen? The Autobiography of John Cale 
by Victor Bockris.
Bloomsbury, 272 pp., £20, January 1999, 0 7475 3668 6
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... repertoire, to compose orchestral pieces, to write scores for ballets or settings for Dylan Thomas poems, however, is well beyond the competence of other stars in the firmament, even Paul McCartney. There have been various, normally embarrassing attempts by rock groups, or ex-members of rock groups going solo, to explore musical ‘concepts’ and ...

‘Wondered at as an owl’

Blair Worden: Cromwell’s Bad Idea, 7 February 2002

Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution 
by Christopher Durston.
Manchester, 270 pp., £15.99, May 2001, 0 7190 6065 6
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... knew would react against the sway of the radical godly. During the elections in Kent Major-General Thomas Kelsey, seeing the country’s seats fall to conservative gentry, urged the Government to ‘maintain the interest of God’s people’, which ‘is to be preferred before a thousand parliaments’. In early modern England unconstitutional perspectives ...

So Much Smoke

Tom Shippey: King Arthur, 20 December 2018

King Arthur: the Making of the Legend 
by Nicholas Higham.
Yale, 380 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 0 300 21092 7
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... lack of corroboration from any European chronicle that eventually – and much to the annoyance of Henry VII – put an end to Arthur-based claims of ancient seniority for English kings.As for the many modern attempts to make sense likewise of Nennius’s list of battles, by identifying place-names and trying to construct a plausible campaign history, Higham ...

Ghosting

Hal Foster: Dead to the World, 29 July 2021

Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons 
by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Zone, 320 pp., £28, April 2021, 978 1 942130 47 5
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... shadow to the devil for magical gifts quickly squandered and so lost his ‘human belonging’, as Thomas Mann put it. Here the Latin adage nomen omen has an ironic twist, for Chamisso thought Schlemihl meant ‘beloved of God’. Variations on the theme abound – his shadow turns up in a Hawthorne story, and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s character Erasmus Spikher ...

Philosophical Vinegar, Marvellous Salt

Malcolm Gaskill: Alchemical Pursuits, 15 July 2021

The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700 
by Jennifer M. Rampling.
Chicago, 408 pp., £28, December 2020, 978 0 226 71070 9
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... epitome of the treasure of health’, which drew on the work of the 15th-century alchemists Thomas Norton and George Ripley, who in turn were indebted to the formulations of Ramon Llull, a 13th-century Majorcan polymath. The key to alchemy was deep reading, between texts and across the ages. Keynes’s scrabbling about for Newton’s papers was as ...

Habits of Empire

David Priestland: Financial Imperialism, 27 July 2023

The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance 
by Jamie Martin.
Harvard, 345 pp., £34.95, June 2022, 978 0 674 97654 2
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... In​ The World Is Flat, published in 2005, Thomas Friedman argued that global trade and finance, presided over by international institutions – the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO – were making the planet not only richer but less hierarchical and unequal. This was a pumped-up version of the Enlightenment theory of doux commerce, which held that growing trade, founded on mutually beneficial contracts and the rule of law, would provide opportunity and riches for all, and eventually consign wars, empires and great-power politics to the past ...

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