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The Moral Life of Barbarians

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 18 August 1983

The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology 
by Anthony Pagden.
Cambridge, 256 pp., £24, September 1982, 0 521 22202 8
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... most of the colonists, couldn’t see it, but to the ingenious theologians, anxious to serve their king and their Church, it seemed providential, precise and even practical. To Bartolomé de Las Casas, however, another Dominican, later Protector of the Indians and Bishop of Chiapa in Yucatan, the line was too fine. ‘False testimony, a contrived argument for ...

All the Advantages

C.H. Sisson, 3 July 1980

Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings 
by Richard Kennedy.
Norton, 529 pp., £12, May 1980, 0 87140 638 1
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... of the aristocracy of the earth, all the advantages that any boy should have are in my hands. I am king over my opportunities. No one can take away from me the possibilities of growth founded on the firm rock of inherent advantage and power. Seventeen was the age at which Cummings entered Harvard, where he stayed for five years. His biographer tells that this ...

A Little Holiday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Ben Hecht’s Cause, 23 September 2021

A Child of the Century 
by Ben Hecht.
Yale, 654 pp., £16, April 2020, 978 0 300 25179 1
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Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures 
by Adina Hoffman.
Yale, 245 pp., £10.99, April 2020, 978 0 300 25181 4
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... to write and produce rousing pageants: Fun to Be Free, written with his frequent Hollywood partner Charles MacArthur, drew large audiences to Madison Square Garden shortly before Pearl Harbor, and starred Jack Benny, Betty Grable, Eddie Cantor, Ethel Merman and Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, who tap-danced on Hitler’s coffin. Hecht also wrote propagandist ...

Great Sums of Money

Ferdinand Mount: Swingeing Taxes, 21 October 2021

The Dreadful Monster and Its Poor Relations: Taxing, Spending and the United Kingdom, 1707-2021 
by Julian Hoppit.
Allen Lane, 324 pp., £25, May, 978 0 241 43442 0
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... appendage for securing popular assent. (Elton provocatively highlighted the successes of Charles I’s personal rule during the eleven years when he no longer bothered with ‘that tiresome body’, as Elton only half-ironically called it.) It is integral to this absolutism that there should be no separation of powers – ‘one of the worst and one ...

Invidious Trumpet

Thomas Keymer: Find the Printer, 9 September 2021

The Paper Chase: The Printer, the Spymaster and the Hunt for the Rebel Pamphleteers 
by Joseph Hone.
Chatto, 251 pp., £18.99, November 2020, 978 1 78474 306 2
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... The Anti-Curse, a broadside poem attacking the ‘damn’d rebellious brood’ who ‘basely did King James depose’, which attracted a heavy fine and three alarming hours in the pillory. His known output over the next few years is understandably anodyne, but he may have continued to print illegal books in secret, and after 1699 he put his head above the ...

Mohocks

Liam McIlvanney: The House of Blackwood, 5 June 2003

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era 
by David Finkelstein.
Pennsylvania State, 199 pp., £44.95, April 2002, 0 271 02179 9
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... relations with a number of comparatively obscure Victorian authors – John Hanning Speke, Charles Reade and Margaret Oliphant – as well as some reflections on the rise of literary agents. There is a good deal of entertainment in these case studies, most consistently in the chapter on Speke, the Nile explorer. Having staked £2000 to win the bidding ...

Fine Art for 39 Cents

Marjorie Garber: Tupperising America, 13 April 2000

Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America 
by Alison Clarke.
Smithsonian, 241 pp., £15.95, November 1999, 1 56098 827 4
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... a set of dinnerware as a prenuptial gift for Princess Elizabeth. Tupperware was presented to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and the Maharaja of Ender, and in 1948 the Tupper ‘Millionaire Line’ of houseware won a major award from the journal Plastics World. But the reputation of plastic was so mixed (some kinds disintegrated; others were malodorous or ...

Killing Stones

Keith Thomas: Holy Places, 19 May 2011

The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland 
by Alexandra Walsham.
Oxford, 637 pp., £35, February 2011, 978 0 19 924355 6
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... they claim, was a newly hatched rationalism running around with the shell on its head. As Charles Taylor wrote in A Secular Age, the Reformation was ‘central to … the abolition of the enchanted cosmos and the eventual creation of a humanist alternative to faith’. This is the influential master narrative to whose attempted demolition Alexandra ...

Messages from the 29th Floor

David Trotter: Lifts, 3 July 2014

Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator 
by Andreas Bernard, translated by David Dollenmayer.
NYU, 309 pp., £21.99, April 2014, 978 0 8147 8716 8
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... devices for the vertical transport of goods, primarily, but also of people. The English diplomat Charles Greville, writing in 1830, recalled with admiration a lift in the Genoese palace of the Sardinian royal couple: ‘For the comfort of their bodies he has a machine made like a car, which is drawn up by a chain from the bottom to the top of the house; it ...

Michael Gove recommends …

Robert Hanks: Dennis Wheatley, 20 January 2011

The Devil Is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley 
by Phil Baker.
Dedalus, 699 pp., £25, October 2009, 978 1 903517 75 8
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... Gregory Sallust, whose looks and personality were inspired by Tombe), an admiring biography of Charles II, melodramatic science fiction in the vein of Edgar Rice Burroughs, ‘Crime Dossiers’, in which a whodunnit is packaged with manufactured clues – a hair in a cellophane wrapper, a spent match from a hotel. In this prodigal context, Wheatley’s ...

My Dagger into Yow

Ian Donaldson: Sidney’s Letters, 25 April 2013

The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney 
edited by Roger Kuin.
Oxford, 1381 pp., £250, July 2012, 978 0 19 955822 3
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... against Spain. Languet, who was then 54, had been sent by the Elector of Saxony to congratulate Charles IX on the peace of Saint-Germain, which, in granting concessions to the Huguenots, marked a brief pause in the French wars of religion. Protestant hopes in Europe rode high, but by August of that year were dashed by the events of St Bartholomew’s ...

Secret Signals in Lotus Flowers

Maya Jasanoff: Myths of the Mutiny, 21 July 2005

The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination 
by Gautam Chakravarty.
Cambridge, 242 pp., £45, January 2005, 0 521 83274 8
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... themselves on the British imagination. One of these was the massacre at Kanpur, where the Maratha king Nana Sahib turned against a corps of about a thousand Europeans, laying siege to their cramped entrenchments. After a punishing fortnight under fire, and some 250 deaths, the British surrendered with a promise of safe passage to Allahabad. But as they pushed ...

What’s the big idea?

Jonathan Parry: The Origins of Our Decline, 30 November 2017

The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914 
by Simon Heffer.
Random House, 912 pp., £30, September 2017, 978 1 84794 742 0
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... through state and society in these years came from the very top. As prince of Wales and then king, Edward VII gambled, had mistresses and corrupted his protectors into indulging his whims, while his son was linked to the sordid allegations about aristocrats and male prostitutes in Cleveland Street. Edward was particularly obsessed with dress, which ...

How to Read Aloud

Irina Dumitrescu, 10 September 2020

Voices and Books in the English Renaissance: A New History of Reading 
by Jennifer Richards.
Oxford, 329 pp., £65, October 2019, 978 0 19 880906 7
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Learning Languages in Early Modern England 
by John Gallagher.
Oxford, 274 pp., £60, August 2019, 978 0 19 883790 9
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... of her ability to ‘speak and write pure Latin, Greek and Hebrew’. ‘But can she spin?’ the king asked. John Gallagher relates this story and many like it in Learning Languages in Early Modern England, in which he assembles a rich body of documentary evidence to illustrate the methods and social importance of instruction in vernacular languages. While ...

Little Beagle

Lucy Wooding: Early Modern Espionage, 12 September 2024

All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil 
by Stephen Alford.
Allen Lane, 424 pp., £30, July, 978 0 241 42347 9
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Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration 
by Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman.
Yale, 317 pp., £20, June, 978 0 300 26754 9
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... blinded with the self-love of your own counsel in holding together of this parliament’. Even the king who owed him so much wasn’t convinced that Cecil held the key to the political process. Administrative skill wasn’t everything in early modern politics. Among those who conceived of the political process in very different terms was Cecil’s sometime ...

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