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Don’t wait to be asked

Clare Bucknell: Revolutionary Portraiture, 2 March 2023

A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830 
by Paris Spies-Gans.
Paul Mellon Centre, 384 pp., £45, June 2022, 978 1 913107 29 1
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... three’ of the Reinagle sisters in 1807 and noted their unsentimental approach to copying the Old Masters. ‘They work very quick, & said, “Picture painted one day; sold the next; money spent the third.”’) Training sometimes began early. Helena Beatson, Read’s niece and pupil, presented her first narrative scenes at the age of eight at the 1771 ...

You can have it for a penny

Malcolm Gaskill: ‘Agent Sonya’, 6 January 2022

Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy 
by Ben Macintyre.
Viking, 377 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 0 241 40850 6
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... what happened. Before she left Britain, she had suggested that an agent be dropped into Germany. Alexander Foote was a Yorkshireman, a former coal merchant, chicken-feed sales manager and RAF deserter, who had run off to fight in the Spanish Civil War after getting a girl pregnant. He enthusiastically accepted the offer of a spying job, knowing only that ...

How to Solve the Puzzle

Donald MacKenzie: On Short Selling, 5 April 2018

... then sow doubt in an effort to depress it’. Chanos told me he was ‘shown the door by my German masters’. ‘Short selling’ is selling shares or other financial instruments that you don’t own, or own only temporarily – shares, for example, that have been borrowed from another investor. Chanos was – and still is – short selling shares that seem ...

Journey to Arezzo

Nicholas Penny: The Apotheosis of Piero, 17 April 2003

Piero della Francesca 
by Roberto Longhi, translated by David Tabbat.
Sheep Meadow, 364 pp., £32.50, September 2002, 1 878818 77 5
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... Christ. Degas himself left these paintings unfinished and began to direct his attention to other masters, but Piero was not forgotten in France. Gustave Moreau claimed that Puvis de Chavannes had been in Italy with Degas in the late 1850s. There seems to be no other evidence that he visited the country after 1848 but he certainly had a close knowledge of the ...

‘Look, look, what ails the ship, she is upsetting’

Peter Nichols: The ship ‘Essex’, 8 March 2001

The Loss of the Ship ‘Essex’, Sunk by a Whale 
by Thomas Nickerson and Owen Chase, edited by Nathaniel Philbrick and Thomas Philbrick et al.
Penguin, 231 pp., £7.99, June 2000, 0 14 043796 7
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... fell in with the whaler William Wirt, of Nantucket, near the Pacific island of Juan Fernández (Alexander Selkirk’s lonely home during the years 1704-9), off the coast of Chile. One of the Acushnet’s fo’c’sle crew was the young Herman Melville. The two ships hove to for a few hours while their masters visited each ...

Diary

Peter Pomerantsev: What fascists?, 19 June 2014

... RIA began to change. The live streams of trials stopped. Hope for a rebellion against the new masters faded when a poll inside the organisation showed that some two-thirds of employees didn’t care what ideology prevailed: it was just a job. ‘At Moscow State Journalism School they have people like Deputy Minister of Communications Volin telling ...

Who were they?

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: ‘Thuggee’, 3 December 2009

Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of ‘Thuggee’ 
edited by Kim Wagner.
Oxford, 318 pp., £22.99, January 2009, 978 0 19 569815 2
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... was met by a near unanimous lack of critical acclaim. The screenplay was based on a novel by John Masters (1914-83), who had served in the British army in India before and during the Second World War. Masters’s family had had a relationship with India stretching back five generations; I have been told by elderly Indian ...

Maiden Aunt

Colin Kidd: Adam Smith, 7 October 2010

Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life 
by Nicholas Phillipson.
Allen Lane, 345 pp., £25, August 2010, 978 0 7139 9396 7
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Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and moral theory 
by Fonna Forman-Barzilai.
Cambridge, 286 pp., £55, March 2010, 978 0 521 76112 3
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... in The Wealth of Nations, ‘seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.’ It takes an especially gifted casuist to convert such sentiments into Thatcherspeak, though it can be done. A further incongruity comes into focus in Nicholas Phillipson’s splendid biography: that the 18th-century moral philosopher bore ...

His Dark Example

Colin Burrow: ‘The Book of Dust’, 4 January 2018

The Book of Dust, Vol. I: La Belle Sauvage 
by Philip Pullman.
David Fickling, 546 pp., £20, October 2017, 978 0 385 60441 3
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Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling 
by Philip Pullman.
David Fickling, 480 pp., £20, October 2017, 978 1 910200 96 4
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... denotes a servant (which as a dog-lover who is aware of the autonomy of those in service to their masters I could never quite accept); snakes indicate, well, snakes; larger beasts tend to connote that their people are creatures of excitement and fear. According to one online test my own daemon is a scarlet macaw. According to another it is a wildcat, although ...

England rejects

V.G. Kiernan, 19 March 1987

The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868 
by Robert Hughes.
Collins Harvill, 688 pp., £15, January 1987, 0 00 217361 1
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Rights of Passage: Emigration to Australia in the 19th Century 
by Helen Woolcock.
Tavistock, 377 pp., £25, September 1986, 9780422602402
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... obloquy and calumny. Another Scot of the praiseworthy sort, and a still more zealous reformer, was Alexander Maconochie, who arrived in Hobart in 1837 as secretary to a new governor, the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin. Like Macquarie, he soon drew attacks from those who wanted no reforms. Scots tended, it would seem, to be either worse than the common run ...

Mythic Elements

Stephen Bann, 30 December 1982

Queen of Stones 
by Emma Tennant.
Cape, 160 pp., £6.95, November 1982, 0 224 02601 1
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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 
by William Kotzwinkle, based on a screenplay by Melissa Mathison.
Arthur Barker, 246 pp., £6.95, November 1982, 0 213 16848 0
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Tales of Afghanistan 
by Amina Shah.
Octagon Press, 128 pp., £6.50, November 1982, 0 900860 94 4
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The Masque of St Eadmundsburg 
by Humphrey Morrison.
Blond and Briggs, 228 pp., £7.95, October 1982, 0 85634 127 4
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A Villa in France 
by J.I.M. Stewart.
Gollancz, 206 pp., £6.95, October 1982, 0 575 03103 4
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Collected Stories: Vol. III 
by Sean O’Faolain.
Constable, 422 pp., £9.95, November 1982, 0 09 463920 5
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Work Suspended and Other Stories 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 318 pp., £2.75, November 1982, 0 14 006518 0
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... but how can we avoid wishing to interpret further the lingering myth of the world-conquering Alexander among these frontier peoples? This is to say nothing of the fact that these folk-tales abound, like all folk-tales, in more or less formulaic elements whose structural role is important, though their literal sense is baffling. Afghan kings seem to have ...

How does one talk to these people?

Andrew O’Hagan: David Storey in the Dark, 1 July 2021

A Stinging Delight: A Memoir 
by David Storey.
Faber, 407 pp., £20, June, 978 0 571 36031 4
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... a postmistress and a pot-boy (Bob Gliddery in Our Mutual Friend), seven surgeons, three dance-masters, a reporter (David Copperfield), a tobacconist (Mrs Chivery in Little Dorrit), two fishermen, 32 teachers, four blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an ...

Pessimism and Boys

Sheila Fitzpatrick: The diary of a Soviet schoolgirl, 6 May 2004

The Diary of a Soviet Schoolgirl 1932-37 
by Nina Lugovskaya, translated by Joanne Turnbull.
Glas, 215 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 9785717200653
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... and executions that followed the murder, comparing the situation to the panic that followed Alexander II’s assassination – except that then there had been a furor over the execution of the six assassins. ‘Why is no one incensed now? . . . What right do these Bolsheviks have to deal with the country and its people so cruelly and arbitrarily ...

Strike at the Knee

Malcolm Gaskill: Italy, 1943, 8 February 2024

The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 
by James Holland.
Bantam, 565 pp., £25, September 2023, 978 1 78763 668 2
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... locations ahead, and waited for them to make a move.The impetuosity of Allied generals, and their masters in Washington and Whitehall, was gradually tempered by this reality. Their armies soon faced another string of defences – the Gustav Line – transecting Italy from the Garigliano River in the west to Ortona in the east, through the Apennines and across ...

Kings Grew Pale

Neal Ascherson: Rethinking 1848, 1 June 2023

Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848-49 
by Christopher Clark.
Allen Lane, 873 pp., £35, April, 978 0 241 34766 9
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... dictatorship, with the return of the censor and the secret police. The Russian socialist exile Alexander Herzen, who witnessed the revolution and counter-revolution in Paris, was heartbroken. He recognised that 1848 had left Europe’s ancient order of blindly deferential monarchy in ruins. But what would replace it? In unforgettable words, Herzen ...

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