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Stay away from politics

William Davies: Why Weber?, 21 September 2023

Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber 
by Wendy Brown.
Harvard, 132 pp., £19.95, April, 978 0 674 27938 4
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... that is now infecting schools and public services. Reactionary intellectuals such as Douglas Murray have identified Black feminist theories of ‘intersectionality’ as the root of the West’s current malaises. This rhetoric is far from harmless, as attested by the censorship of gender studies by Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary, and similar ...

Witchcraft and the Inquisition

Robin Briggs, 18 June 1981

Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late 16th and Early 17th Centuries 
by D.P. Walker.
Scolar, 116 pp., £9.95, March 1981, 9780859676205
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The Witches’ Advocate 
by Gustav Henningsen.
Nevada, 607 pp., $24, November 1980, 0 87417 056 7
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... this awkward attack that Harsnett diverted attention back to the exorcisms conducted by the Jesuit William Weston at Denham and other places in 1585-6; various participants were tracked down to be interrogated, their depositions and a Book of Miracles kept by the priests forming the basis for Harsnett’s scornful treatise of 1603. Professor Walker makes ...

Leave them weeping

Colin Grant: Frederick Douglass, 1 August 2019

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom 
by David Blight.
Simon and Schuster, 892 pp., £30, November 2018, 978 1 4165 9031 6
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... and within two years he’d hatched another plan. In Baltimore he’d fallen in love with Anna Murray, a free black woman. She provided funds, documents that enabled him to travel (‘free papers’ lent by a retired black sailor) and naval costume – and Douglass took a series of trains north. On 4 September 1838 he arrived in New York: ‘I was a ...

Blame it on Darwin

Jonathan Rée, 5 October 2017

Charles Darwin, Victorian Mythmaker 
by A.N. Wilson.
John Murray, 438 pp., £25, September 2017, 978 1 4447 9488 5
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... was snowing butterflies,’ and such in fact was the appearance.In 1845 the publisher John Murray reissued the book for a large public. Darwin became a literary celebrity. Voyage of the Beagle (to use the title Murray gave it) is a vivid travelogue, but it also carries heavy theoretical freight. Darwin was struck by ...

A Regular Bull

Christopher Hitchens, 31 July 1997

Whittaker Chambers: A Biography 
by Sam Tanenhaus.
Random House, 640 pp., $35, February 1997, 0 394 58559 3
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... Bellow replied that his study had been English literature. He was asked to give his opinion of William Wordsworth as a poet. He responded that he had always thought of William Wordsworth as one of the Romantics. ‘There is no place for you,’ said Chambers on hearing this, ‘in this organisation.’ The future Nobel ...

Chucky, Hirple, Clart

David Craig: Robert Macfarlane, 24 September 2015

Landmarks 
by Robert Macfarlane.
Hamish Hamilton, 387 pp., £20, March 2015, 978 0 241 14653 8
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... his mindset differs from that of most of the country writers who have stayed with me indelibly: William Cobbett of Rural Rides, a farmer’s son and himself a farmer from time to time; John Muir of My First Summer in the Sierra, a farmer’s son and farmer; and Lewis Grassic Gibbon of A Scots Quair, a farmer’s son from the Mearns in north-east ...

Corncob Caesar

Murray Sayle, 6 February 1997

Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of Douglas MacArthur 
by Geoffrey Perret.
Deutsch, 663 pp., £20, October 1996, 9780233990026
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... you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific, said he was the greatest soldier in American history. Never much regarded in Britain, he is still recalled with loathing in Australia. When Americans remember him, it is with something close to ...

Blighted Plain

Jonathan Meades: Wiltshire’s Multitudes, 6 January 2022

The Buildings of England: Wiltshire 
by Julian Orbach, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 828 pp., £45, June 2021, 978 0 300 25120 3
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... Henry Clutton, who had originally been appointed and had done the Chapter House (assisted by William Burges, experimenting with colours), rendered himself ineligible by converting to Catholicism.Had Clutton continued, the cathedral would be a building rather different from the one we see today. He wasn’t a man to hide his Francophile ...

Après-Mao

Michael Hofmann: Yiyun Li, 15 June 2017

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life 
by Yiyun Li.
Hamish Hamilton, 208 pp., £14.99, February 2017, 978 0 241 28395 0
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... says, more smartly and sassily, less mysteriously, in another story. Of course it was also, as Les Murray puts it, ‘the years of the Coffee Revolution/and the Smallgoods Renaissance’. ‘Now we have Sony and Panasonic; we have Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson,’ one of Li’s speakers notes, with as much historiographic brilliance. I tried hard to find ...

Dining Room Radicals

Rosemary Hill, 7 April 2022

Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age 
by Daisy Hay.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, April 2022, 978 1 78474 018 4
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... that Johnson and Fuseli may have been lovers. It seems unlikely. At one point the young John Murray, founder of the publishing dynasty who was now established in the Strand and was a friend of Johnson, reported to a correspondent that Johnson had got over a spot of bother with venereal disease – ‘I hear nothing of his I-ch nor the bountifull Lady who ...

Death in Greece

Marilyn Butler, 17 September 1981

Byron’s Letter and Journals. Vol. XI: For Freedom’s Battle 
edited by Leslie Marchand.
Murray, 243 pp., £11.50, April 1981, 0 7195 3792 4
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Byron: The Complete Poetical Works 
edited by Jerome McGann.
Oxford, 464 pp., £35, October 1980, 0 19 811890 2
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Red Shelley 
by Paul Foot.
Sidgwick, 293 pp., £12.95, May 1981, 0 283 98679 4
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Ugo Foscolo, Poet of Exile 
by Glauco Cambon.
Princeton, 360 pp., £15, September 1980, 0 691 06424 5
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... who clearly understood that he was to see it through the press, but the nervous publisher John Murray preferred the politically safe editorial hand of William Gifford. The material censored by Murray and Gifford now appears in full, and McGann is right to point to the enhancement of ...

Like Cooking a Dumpling

Mike Jay: Victorian Science Writing, 20 November 2014

Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age 
by James Secord.
Oxford, 306 pp., £18.99, March 2014, 978 0 19 967526 5
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... the science that came most immediately into conflict with scripture, obliging Lyell’s teacher William Buckland to contain his visions of lost worlds and extinct monsters within the biblical framework of Creation, Fall and Deluge. Lyell, by birth a Tory squire but by conviction a metropolitan Whig, had a solid grasp of conservative anxieties: he abstained ...

The Great NBA Disaster

John Sutherland, 19 October 1995

... 1907. The Times fatally compromised its case by forging a letter slandering the publisher John Murray and publishing it in its columns. Murray brought a libel action, and won £7000 damages. The Book Club was wound up. (The latest NBA brouhaha has blown up when the Times is again accused of cooking its correspondence ...

A Preference for Strenuous Ghosts

Michael Kammen: Theodore Roosevelt, 6 June 2002

Theodore Rex 
by Edmund Morris.
HarperCollins, 772 pp., £25, March 2002, 0 00 217708 0
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... solid biographies of Eisenhower in two volumes (1983-84) and Nixon in three (1987-91). And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt ...

Swank and Swagger

Ferdinand Mount: Deals with the Pasha, 26 May 2022

Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East 
by Jonathan Parry.
Princeton, 453 pp., £35, April, 978 0 691 18189 9
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... frankness’. Alliances with the Wahhabi were mooted seventy years before the explorer Captain William Shakespear’s momentous friendship with Ibn Saud, which began Britain’s long and dubious relationship with that dour autocracy and which ended for Shakespear with his death in 1915 while photographing the charge of Ibn Saud’s cavalry, making him ...

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