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A Man with My Trouble

Colm Tóibín: Henry James leaves home, 3 January 2008

The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-72: Volume I 
edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias.
Nebraska, 391 pp., £57, January 2007, 978 0 8032 2584 8
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The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-72: Volume II 
edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias.
Nebraska, 524 pp., £60, January 2007, 978 0 8032 2607 4
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... After the death of Henry James’s father in 1882, his sister-in-law Catharine Walsh, better known as Aunt Kate, burned a large quantity of the family papers, including many letters between Henry James senior and his wife. Henry James himself in later life made a number of bonfires in which he destroyed a great quantity of the letters he had received ...

Public Enemy

R.W. Johnson, 26 November 1987

Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover 
by Richard Gid Powers.
Hutchinson, 624 pp., £16.95, August 1987, 0 02 925060 9
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... That Hoover persecuted Martin Luther King is notorious, but Hoover was also the man who drove Marcus Garvey out of America. Similarly, the Hoover who turned his malign attention upon the anti-Vietnam War movement was the same man who had, half a century before, hounded Emma Goldman and John Reed and, later, put Leon Trotsky under surveillance in ...

On a par with Nixon

Stephen Alford: Bad Queen Bess?, 17 November 2016

Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I 
by Peter Lake.
Oxford, 497 pp., £35, January 2016, 978 0 19 875399 5
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Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years 
by John Guy.
Viking, 494 pp., £25, May 2016, 978 0 670 92225 3
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... couched in consciously classical terms: the outstanding example here is the Rainbow Portrait by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. But there was no suppression or destruction of images that Elizabeth or her council found offensive. Isaac Oliver’s miniature of the queen at 59, for example, is compellingly realistic. It was not suppressed, nor were the prints ...

Ramadhin and Valentine

J.R. Pole, 13 October 1988

A History of West Indies Cricket 
by Michael Manley.
Deutsch, 575 pp., £17.95, May 1988, 0 233 98259 0
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Sobers: Twenty Years at the Top 
by Garfield Sobers and Brian Scovell.
Macmillan, 204 pp., £11.95, June 1988, 0 333 37267 0
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... that Manley omits to mention. For despite the ethnic tones of the local clubs, of which C.L.R. James has left us such a fascinating record, West Indian teams were by definition multiracial from the beginning. Whites may have been expected to lead, but white and black players played as equals in representative matches – unlike the gentlemen and players of ...

Four Moptop Yobbos

Ian Penman, 17 June 2021

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 642 pp., £9.99, March, 978 0 00 834003 2
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The Beatles and Sixties Britain 
by Marcus Collins.
Cambridge, 382 pp., £90, March 2020, 978 1 108 47724 6
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The Beatles in Context 
edited by Kenneth Womack.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £74.99, January 2020, 978 1 108 41911 6
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... like ‘fab’. (It first appeared circa 1957 and became attached to the Beatles around 1963.)In Marcus Collins’s The Beatles and Sixties Britain, Burgess is one of a long list of mainstream commentators (variously Grub or Fleet Street, middlebrow or mandarin) whose reaction to the Beatles was somewhere between a fit of the vapours and fear of imminent ...

Dixie Peach Pomade

Alex Abramovich: In the Room with Robert Johnson, 6 October 2022

Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson 
by Annye C. Anderson with Preston Lauterbach.
Hachette Go, 224 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 0 306 84526 0
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... aficionados started touring the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified blues ...

Who’s the real wolf?

Kevin Okoth: Black Marseille, 23 September 2021

Romance in Marseille 
by Claude McKay.
Penguin, 208 pp., £12.99, May 2020, 978 0 14 313422 0
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... arguing that his fictional version of the neighbourhood too closely resembled Black Marseille. James Weldon Johnson, who had spent the 1920s as executive secretary of the NAACP, went further, suggesting that McKay needed to return to America. ‘I feel very strongly that you ought to come and stay. New York is your market, and the United States is your ...

Versailles with Panthers

James Davidson: A tribute to the Persians, 10 July 2003

From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire 
by Pierre Briant, translated by Peter Daniels.
Eisenbrauns, 1196 pp., $79.50, January 2002, 1 57506 031 0
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Ancient Persia from 550 BC to 650 AD: reissue 
by Josef Wiesehöfer, translated by Azizeh Azodi.
Tauris, 332 pp., £35, April 2001, 1 85043 999 0
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... were supposed to be. He even found a statue of Sargon (2340-2284 BCE), as ancient for Nabonidus as Marcus Aurelius is for us. He glued it back together and re-erected it. Pierre Briant’s greatest achievement in his encyclopedic history of the Persian Empire, From Cyrus to Alexander, translated, with a few additions, from Histoire de l’Empire perse ...

The Spree

Frank Kermode, 22 February 1996

The Feminisation of American Culture 
by Ann Douglas.
Papermac, 403 pp., £10, February 1996, 0 333 65421 8
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Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the Twenties 
by Ann Douglas.
Picador, 606 pp., £20, February 1996, 0 330 34683 0
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... efforts at artistic autonomy as more successful than their political initiatives, which included Marcus Garvey’s campaign for a mass return to Africa, and a new claim, subsequently reinforced, to be originators rather than imitators of American culture. She records with considerable vivacity the effect of their arts on the culture at large, and has good ...

To Own Whiteness

Musab Younis, 10 February 2022

Nice Racism 
by Robin DiAngelo.
Allen Lane, 224 pp., £17.99, June 2021, 978 0 241 51935 6
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Me and White Supremacy 
by Layla Saad.
Quercus, 242 pp., £14.99, January 2020, 978 1 5294 0510 1
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Do Better 
by Rachel Ricketts.
Gallery, 383 pp., £16.99, February 2021, 978 1 3985 0345 8
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What White People Can Do Next 
by Emma Dabiri.
Penguin, 176 pp., £7.99, April 2021, 978 0 14 199673 8
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... represents a departure from an earlier tradition. ‘As long as you think you’re white,’ James Baldwin once said, ‘there’s no hope for you.’Attempts to dismantle racism have often subverted its vocabulary, turning epithets into appellations of pride. But anti-racist intellectuals have also been alert to the risk of nativism, of falling deeper ...

Powered by Fear

Linda Colley: Putting the navy in its place, 3 February 2005

The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649-1815 
by N.A.M. Rodger.
Allen Lane, 907 pp., £30, September 2004, 0 7139 9411 8
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... unable to raise the revenue to pay the crews. After the Restoration in 1660, both Charles II and James II demonstrated enthusiasm and expertise in nurturing naval expansion. But the Royal Navy’s performance in the Second and Third Dutch Wars was uneven, and political and religious divisions among its officers and men enabled William III and the Dutch fleet ...

Perfect Companions

C.K. Stead, 8 June 1995

Christina Stead: A Biography 
by Hazel Rowley.
Secker, 646 pp., £12.99, January 1995, 0 436 20298 0
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... radicalism: CS: We know how it was formed and this very gloomy background which is expressed by Marcus Clarke in For the Term of his Natural Life, you know that, everybody knows that ...? INT.: Yes. CS: ... forms a background, or did then, the background to an Australian’s thoughts. So she was able to see her Australian roots as making it easy for ...

The Public Voice of Women

Mary Beard, 20 March 2014

... of attempts to write women out of public discourse, Telemachus-style. Anyone who has read Henry James’s Bostonians, published in the 1880s, will remember that one main theme in the book is the silencing of Verena Tarrant, a young feminist campaigner and speaker. As she draws closer to her suitor Basil Ransom (a man endowed, as ...

Failed Vocation

James Butler: The Corbyn Project, 3 December 2020

Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn 
by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire.
Bodley Head, 376 pp., £18.99, September, 978 1 84792 645 6
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This Land: The Story of a Movement 
by Owen Jones.
Allen Lane, 336 pp., £20, September, 978 0 241 47094 7
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... in the party’s policy conveyor belt: increasingly aware, in the words of the polling consultant Marcus Roberts, that ‘the soufflé wouldn’t rise twice,’ they attempted to replace organic enthusiasm with a blitzkrieg of pledges. It is a lesson that political tides cannot be generated – they can only be ridden.The left’s control over the party and ...

Unblenched

Lucie Elven: Homage to Brigid Brophy, 21 March 2024

Hackenfeller’s Ape 
by Brigid Brophy.
Faber, 133 pp., £9.99, October 2023, 978 0 571 38129 6
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... intimate occasions of which this is not true.)’ In the jacket photograph she was decked out as James Joyce, with a felt-tip monocle over one eye. ‘The picture of you on the back rather turns my head,’ Murdoch wrote. ‘You dazzling creature.’ (Years later, she tried a new tack: ‘I am not a great writer. Neither are you.’)After Brophy’s first ...

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