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Under the Loincloth

Frank Kermode, 3 April 1997

The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion 
by Leo Steinberg.
Chicago, 417 pp., £23.95, January 1997, 0 226 77187 3
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... Charles Hope – are, in this new edition, keenly reprehended. It should be said that Steinberg, a lively and resourceful writer, could not with any justice be charged with irreverence or lubricity. That he greatly enjoyed researching, writing and defending his thesis is clear enough, and fair enough; his satisfaction is of a legitimate, scholarly kind. He has ...

Waving

Anthony Thwaite, 27 October 1988

Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography 
by Frances Spalding.
Faber, 331 pp., £15, October 1988, 0 571 15207 4
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... and literary editors (that is, employers), with most of whom she quickly established a remarkably lively and gossipy relationship. Diana Athill, John Guest, Terence Kilmartin, and many others, were recipients of chat, grumbles, doubts, jokes, questions, japes – often with cross-references to each other: if one editor disapproved of a new poem, she told ...

C.K. Stead writes about Christina Stead

C.K. Stead, 4 September 1986

Ocean of Story: The Uncollected Stories of Christina Stead 
edited by R.G. Geering.
Viking, 552 pp., £12.95, April 1986, 0 670 80996 9
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The Salzburg Tales 
by Christina Stead.
498 pp., £4.95, September 1986, 0 86068 691 4
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... whom she identifies. The secure sense of national identity came from her father: ‘David was an Adam,’ she wrote of him. ‘Australia was his prolific and innocent garden.’She was forty years away but always on the move, living (to put the places in roughly chronological order), in London, Paris, Spain, Hollywood, New ...

Eden without the Serpent

Eric Foner, 11 December 1997

A History of the American People 
by Paul Johnson.
Weidenfeld, 925 pp., £25, October 1997, 0 297 81569 5
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... If Morgan and Davis are too politically correct for Johnson’s taste, he could have recurred to Adam Smith, who noted more than two centuries ago that in a political democracy it was all the more difficult to abolish slavery, since ‘the persons who make the laws in that country are persons who have slaves themselves.’The very ‘freedom of the ...

Diary

Tariq Ali: Libya during the Cartoon Controversy, 9 March 2006

... to the imitations of Dallas typical of the cities of the Gulf States. In a waterfront café with a lively Libyan intellectual, freshly returned from Canada and excited about his plans to launch a weekly newspaper, I notice that most of the young women, including those arm-in-arm with a boyfriend, are hijabed. A few of the hijabs are worn tight to look like a ...

Boots the Bishop

Barbara Newman: Albert the Magnificent, 1 December 2022

Albertus Magnus and the World of Nature 
by Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell.
Reaktion, 272 pp., £16.95, August 2022, 978 1 78914 513 7
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... Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell, who have long toiled on the Albertian corpus, provide a lively, accessible introduction to his life and thought. Albert joined the Dominican Order around 1223 and spent most of his long academic career between Paris and Cologne, where Thomas Aquinas was his star student. Even then, the university was no ivory ...

Coke v. Bacon

Stephen Sedley, 27 July 2023

The Winding Stair 
by Jesse Norman.
Biteback, 464 pp., £20, June, 978 1 78590 792 0
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... fellow of All Souls as well as a junior minister, is an experienced biographer (he has done Adam Smith and Edmund Burke), but has set out here to write a novel, not a double biography. He is interested in the points at which the trajectories of these two intelligent and vain careerists intersected. One occurred in 1616, in what became known as the Case ...

Too Much

Barbara Taylor: A history of masturbation, 6 May 2004

Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation 
by Thomas Laqueur.
Zone, 501 pp., £21.95, March 2003, 1 890951 32 3
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... fear and shame? Why, in the course of the 18th century, as Thomas Laqueur asks in this rich and lively history, did a practice tolerated by the ancients and largely ignored by Judeo-Christian moralists, come to be seen as the height of erotic depravity? Laqueur, who teaches at Berkeley, is the author of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud ...

There is no cure

Michael Wood: Freud’s Guesswork, 6 July 2006

The Penguin Freud Reader 
edited by Adam Phillips.
Penguin, 570 pp., £14.99, January 2006, 0 14 118743 3
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... and that, of course, would in no way rob the drives of their mythic power, or their importance. Adam Phillips quotes Wittgenstein’s remark about the mythology and its inducement at the head of his introduction to the Penguin Freud Reader, a very rich selection of Freud’s writing, long and short, which includes the letter to Romain ...

The sea is the same sea

Adam Shatz: Bibi goes to Washington, 30 August 2018

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu 
by Anshel Pfeffer.
Hurst, 423 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 84904 988 7
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... began. Still, Israeli liberals could reasonably invoke the country’s free elections and lively press as evidence of democratic vitality, at least for Jews. Under Netanyahu, not only has the occupation become even more entrenched, but the line between Israel and the occupied territories has continued to blur. Ahmed Tibi, a Palestinian member of the ...

Someone else’s shoes

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 23 November 1989

A Treatise on Social Justice. Vol. I: Theories of Justice 
by Brian Barry.
Harvester, 428 pp., £30, May 1989, 0 7450 0641 8
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Innocence and Experience 
by Stuart Hampshire.
Allen Lane, 195 pp., £16.95, October 1989, 0 7139 9027 9
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... about the public good at all) agree that our own present sense of what, exactly, these two more lively kinds of argument for justice now are, and of how we might decide between them, owes almost everything to John Rawls. Barry, certainly, has no doubt: Rawls is simply ‘the greatest political philosopher of the century’. But Rawls’s qualities, as Barry ...

Tidy-Mindedness

Diarmaid MacCulloch: The Crusades, 24 September 2015

How to Plan a Crusade: Reason and Religious War in the High Middle Ages 
by Christopher Tyerman.
Allen Lane, 400 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 1 84614 477 6
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... claim derived from primeval history. Because of the unfortunate events in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, humankind’s capacity for rational understanding was fatally damaged, the damage extending to all their posterity: that, essentially, was the first humans’ punishment. Some Christians said that the capacity was totally lost and ...

Consider the lions

Peter Campbell, 22 July 1993

The House of Gold 
by Richard Goy.
Cambridge, 304 pp., £60, January 1993, 0 521 40513 0
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The Palace of the Sun 
by Robert Berger.
Pennsylvania State, 232 pp., £55, April 1993, 0 271 00847 4
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... not a minor strand in architectural history. There have been active designers – Classicists like Adam, Goths like Pugin, Hellenists like Stuart and Modernists like Venturi, as well as historians (Ruskin, Pevsner, Banham) – who have had opinions on the future as well as the past of architecture. The emulating eye may be self-serving and envious, but it is ...

The Virtue of Incest

Marina Warner, 7 October 1993

Elizabeth’s Glass 
by Marc Shell.
Nebraska, 365 pp., £30.95, July 1993, 0 8032 4216 6
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... as well he might, for as he points out, the manuscript conjoins three of the most brilliant and lively-minded queens of the era: Marguerite of Navarre was the compiler of The Heptameron, a collection of secular tales, as well as a Reformist sympathiser, friend of Calvin and patron of independent scholars; Catherine Parr also composed religious ...

Beasts or Brothers?

J.H. Elliott: When Columbus Met the Natives, 3 July 2008

The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus 
by David Abulafia.
Yale, 379 pp., £25, April 2008, 978 0 300 12582 5
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Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil 
edited and translated by Neil Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier.
Duke, 206 pp., £12.99, September 2008, 978 0 8223 4231 1
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... some of them walk around naked, and apparently without shame? Did they share in the innocence of Adam before the Fall, or did the absence of shame mean that they were nearer to beasts than to humans? What criteria were available for assessing the degree of their rationality, if indeed their natures were more rational than bestial? What right did Europeans ...

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