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As Bad as Poisoned

Blair Worden: James I, 3 March 2016

The Murder of King James I 
by Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell.
Yale, 618 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 300 21496 3
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... special frisson to death by poison. In 1612 the death of James’s heir, Charles’s elder brother Henry, was ascribed to poison. The charge was false, but in the following year the political world was rocked by the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower by agents of the wife of the king’s then leading ...

Bard of Friendly Fire

Robert Crawford: The Radical Burns, 25 July 2002

Robert Burns: Poems 
edited by Don Paterson.
Faber, 96 pp., £4.99, February 2001, 0 571 20740 5
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The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns 
edited by Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg.
Canongate, 1017 pp., £40, November 2001, 0 86241 994 8
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... next century, the idea of the bard became linked to Homeric epic. By 1735 the Aberdeen philosopher Thomas Blackwell was writing that Homer was a ‘stroling indigent Bard’. Robert Burns liked that idea. In ‘Love and Liberty’ a bard sings alongside prostitutes and tinkers, and pronounces himself ‘Homer like’. Burns’s footnote (Burns enjoyed ...

Roaming the Greenwood

Colm Tóibín: A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods, 21 January 1999

A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition 
by Gregory Woods.
Yale, 448 pp., £24.95, February 1998, 0 300 07201 5
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... to make anachronistic judgments and ask anachronistic questions is hard to avoid. Why didn’t Thomas Mann come out? Why didn’t Forster publish Maurice in 1914, when he wrote it? Why didn’t the American critic F.O. Matthiessen write a history of gay American writing? How come Lionel Trilling didn’t realise that Forster was gay? And why are gay lives ...

In the Teeth of the Gale

A.D. Nuttall, 16 November 1995

The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation 
edited by Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule.
Oxford, 606 pp., £19.99, October 1995, 0 19 214209 7
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... are read all over the world while Pushkin, despite the efforts of John Fennell, Antony Wood. DM. Thomas and Vladimir Nabokov, remains primarily a writer for readers of Russian. The myriad imperfections of rendering in any translation of a novel do not seriously impede what looks like genuine literary enjoyment: we weep for Anna Karenina and tremble at ...

Manchester’s Moment

Boyd Hilton, 20 August 1998

Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 
by Anthony Howe.
Oxford, 336 pp., £45, December 1997, 9780198201465
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The Origins of War Prevention: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1730-1854 
by Martin Ceadel.
Oxford, 587 pp., £55, December 1996, 0 19 822674 8
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... propagated the faith after his death, and of Cobdenite mandarins such as Louis Mallet and Thomas Farrer, is a timely reminder of just how powerfully ingrained liberal commercial values became. Pure Cobdenism was a form of humanitarian cosmopolitanism, based on the international brotherhood of man. Practical Cobdenism, as it evolved in the 1850s and ...

Elton at seventy

Patrick Collinson, 11 June 1992

Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study 
by G.R. Elton.
Cambridge, 128 pp., £16.95, October 1991, 0 521 41098 3
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... he selected at the outset was the great hoard of stale papers compiled by the Tudor statesman, Thomas Cromwell, and fortunately conserved as public property through the accident of Cromwell’s fall. Like Mallory’s Everest, the archive was there, but the circumstances which immersed Elton in it for more than twenty exceptionally fruitful years included ...

Born to Network

Anthony Grafton, 22 August 1996

The Fortunes of ‘The Courtier’: The European Reception of Castiglione’s ‘Cortegiano’ 
by Peter Burke.
Polity, 209 pp., £39.50, October 1995, 0 7456 1150 8
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... that court life belongs to the realm of serious play (a theme studied to splendid effect by Thomas Greene). The world of the court is rich, splendid, noble; but it is also a hortus conclusus, confining its inhabitants to a narrow space. Early illustrations show the participants in these discussions stiffly lined up in a room of no great size. Court ...

Identity Parade

Linda Colley, 25 February 1993

People and Places: Country House Donors and the National Trust 
by James Lees-Milne.
Murray, 232 pp., £19.99, October 1992, 0 7195 5145 5
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The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 
by Michael Dobson.
Oxford, 266 pp., £30, October 1992, 0 19 811233 5
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Myths of the English 
edited by Roy Porter.
Polity, 280 pp., £39.50, October 1992, 0 7456 0844 2
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Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States 
by Stephen Daniels.
Polity, 257 pp., £39.50, November 1992, 0 7456 0450 1
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... is not only a composite of three much older nations, but also fractured throughout by regionalism. Henry James is quoted to the effect that Warwickshire ‘is the core and centre of the English world ... unmitigated England’. Conversely, the gardens of Wallington in far Northumberland are Scottish in style. And Blickling in Norfolk is as culturally and ...

Play for Today

Adam Smyth: Rewriting ‘Pericles’, 24 October 2019

Spring 
by Ali Smith.
Hamish Hamilton, 336 pp., £16.99, March 2019, 978 0 241 20704 8
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The Porpoise 
by Mark Haddon.
Chatto, 309 pp., £18.99, May 2019, 978 1 78474 282 9
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... the Interregnum in 1660, Pericles was the first Shakespeare play to be performed, with a youthful Thomas Betterton, aged 25, celebrated in the title role at the Phoenix in Drury Lane. In fact Pericles was more than simply popular: the play became a byword for audience appeal and recognition. In The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl (c.1613-14), Robert Taylor ...

Stupid Questions

Laleh Khalili: Battlefield to Boardroom, 24 February 2022

Risk: A User’s Guide 
by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico.
Penguin, 343 pp., £20, October 2021, 978 0 241 48192 9
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... of state George Schultz, the former secretaries of defence Bill Perry and Jim Mattis, and even Henry Kissinger, none of whom had any knowledge of haematology or phlebotomy, but all of whom could provide a gateway to lucrative Pentagon contracts. Theranos’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, even courted Special Operations Command, but this potential liaison was ...

Too Proud to Fight

David Reynolds: The ‘Lusitania’ Effect, 28 November 2002

Wilful Murder: The Sinking of the ‘Lusitania’ 
by Diana Preston.
Doubleday, 543 pp., £18.99, May 2002, 0 385 60173 5
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Lusitania: Saga and Myth 
by David Ramsay.
Chatham, 319 pp., £20, September 2001, 1 86176 170 8
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Woodrow Wilson 
by John Thompson.
Longman, 288 pp., £15.99, August 2002, 0 582 24737 3
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... passengers, who included the American tycoon Alfred Vanderbilt and the Welsh mining magnate D.A. Thomas. The German submarine U-20 had already torpedoed three British cargo vessels off the Irish coast. At lunchtime on 7 May its captain, Walther Schwieger, sighted a four-stack passenger liner, clearly British, and dived to intercept her. He fired a single ...

Call Her Daisy-Ray

John Sturrock: Accents and Attitudes, 11 September 2003

Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol 
by Lynda Mugglestone.
Oxford, 354 pp., £35, February 2003, 0 19 925061 8
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... dropped. The manual purports to have been written by the problem letter itself, alias the ‘Hon. Henry H.’ – though putting an unaspirated ‘Hon.’ in front of the name is hardly playing fair with uncertain readers, who might be tempted to aspirate it out of the deference accorded to rank. Having worked her way along the self-help shelf, Mugglestone ...

Gold-Digger

Colin Burrow: Walter Ralegh, 8 March 2012

Sir Walter Ralegh in Life and Legend 
by Mark Nicholls and Penry Williams.
Continuum, 378 pp., £25, February 2012, 978 1 4411 1209 5
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The Favourite: Sir Walter Ralegh in Elizabeth I’s Court 
by Mathew Lyons.
Constable, 354 pp., £14.99, March 2011, 978 1 84529 679 7
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... By befriending (and from about 1583 employing) the notable mathematician and navigational theorist Thomas Harriot, Ralegh established himself as someone who had the capital, connections and theoretical expertise to exploit the wealth of the Americas. In 1584 he snapped up the patent to colonise ‘remote heathen and barbarous landes’ which had been granted ...

The Calvinist International

Colin Kidd: Hugh Trevor-Roper, 22 May 2008

The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History 
by Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Yale, 267 pp., £18.99, May 2008, 978 0 300 13686 9
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Europe’s Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne 
by Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Yale, 438 pp., £25, October 2006, 0 300 11263 7
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... despite the mysterious death of James’s heir, the bluff and patriotically Protestant Prince Henry, and the scandalous poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, a victim of the factional ambitions of the pro-Hispanic Howard faction. Tasty comestibles, stomach cramps, medical interventions and geopolitical strategy were, it ...

Horror like Thunder

Germaine Greer: Lucy Hutchinson, 21 June 2001

Order and Disorder 
by Lucy Hutchinson, edited by David Norbrook.
Blackwell, 272 pp., £55, January 2001, 0 631 22061 5
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... couplets was an achievement unattempted by anyone before and unachieved by anyone since, including Thomas Creech in 1682. Lucy’s first children, twin sons, were born in 1639; she was last pregnant in 1662, so her children may have frequented the schoolroom for rather more than twenty years; her translation of Lucretius could have taken her as long. Though ...

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