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Three Weeks Wide

Rosemary Hill: A Psychohistory of France, 7 July 2022

France: An Adventure History 
by Graham Robb.
Picador, 527 pp., £25, March, 978 1 5290 0762 6
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... bicycle tour of France has something of all of these about it. Like Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Space (1997), which pursues the ‘problem of England’ through the eyes of an unseen narrator travelling in the spirit of Daniel Defoe along paths since obstructed by nuclear power stations and motorways, Robb covers French space and time ...

The Hard Zone

Andrew O’Hagan: At the Republican National Convention, 1 August 2024

... with those who wanted to be safe accepting they were chained to a higher power. For the delegates, Christian faith is a form of specialness – the backbone of the ‘American exceptionalism’ we would hear about all week – and its lessons seemed clear. It meant that God would protect them, as he protected Trump from the wicked shooter. God was very much in ...

How to Kowtow

D.J. Enright: The thoughts of China, 29 July 1999

The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds 
by Jonathan Spence.
Penguin, 279 pp., £20, May 1999, 0 7139 9313 8
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... iron to make nails.) Even the armour they wore was made from shiny paper. (In the second part of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe had ridiculed China’s trade, pitiful in comparison with ‘the universal commerce’ of Europe, and its pathetic army, furnished with erratic firearms and powder lacking in strength. What particularly annoyed Defoe in his fiction was ...

More than a Religion

Malise Ruthven: ‘What Is Islam?’, 8 September 2016

What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic 
by Shahab Ahmed.
Princeton, 609 pp., £29.95, November 2015, 978 0 691 16418 2
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... Ahmed takes issue with Hodgson and the scholars who followed him – Ira Lapidus, Chase Robinson, Aziz al Azmeh et al. There is no one ‘Islam’, he says; the word is so ambiguous, governing so many variations in religious practice and such a multitude of societies, as to be useless as a term of historical explanation. Instead, he argues, Islam is ...

Little Monstrosities

Hannah Rose Woods: Victorian Dogdom, 16 March 2023

Doggy People: The Victorians Who Made the Modern Dog 
by Michael Worboys.
Manchester, 312 pp., £20, February, 978 1 5261 6772 9
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... the queen, to be ‘the most popular of her sex in the ranks of the Doggy people’.Alice Stennard Robinson (née Cornwell) was an Australian gold rush millionaire, nicknamed ‘Princess Midas’ and ‘the Lady of the Nuggets’, who purchased the Sunday Times seemingly on a whim and installed her lover as editor. She also established the Ladies Kennel ...

Dancing Senator

Pat Rogers, 7 November 1985

Memoirs of King George II: Vols I, II and III 
by Horace Walpole, edited by John Brooke.
Yale, 248 pp., £65, June 1985, 0 300 03197 1
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... one.’ Generally even his sourest observations carry some ring of truth: ‘Sir Thomas [Robinson] had been bred in German courts, and was rather restored than naturalised to the genius of that country: he had German honour, loved German politics, and could explain himself as little as if he spoke only German. He might have remained in obscurity, if ...

Mary, Mary

Christopher Hitchens, 8 April 1993

Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover 
by Anthony Summers.
Gollancz, 576 pp., £18.99, March 1993, 0 575 04236 2
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... we found out his real name was David Daniel Kamirsky ... There is one who calls himself Edward G. Robinson. His real name is Emanuel Goldenberg. There is another one here who calls himself Melvyn Douglas whose name is Melvyn Desselberg. There are others too numerous to mention. They are attacking the Committee for doing its duty to protect this country and ...

All Eat All

Jenny Diski: The Cannibal in Me, 6 August 2009

An Intellectual History of Cannibalism 
by Catalin Avramescu, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth.
Princeton, 350 pp., £17.95, May 2009, 978 0 691 13327 0
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... or the last remaining source of sustenance is, like the preposterous single footprint that alerts Robinson Crusoe to lethal man-eating others on his island, all the more exciting for his improbability. The theoretical cannibals are so much better to think with than domesticated, actual Armin Meiwes. Catalin Avramescu considers their historical reality an ...

Water on the Brain

Dinah Birch: Spurious Ghosts, 30 November 2023

‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’ and Other Stories 
by Vernon Lee, edited by Aaron Worth.
Oxford, 352 pp., £7.99, September 2022, 978 0 19 883754 1
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... essay ‘The Gods in Exile’ imagines disguised Greek gods wandering disconsolately through the Christian world, and this conceit was picked up by a generation of writers who had turned away from Christianity. They lament the old ‘Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day’, as Swinburne put it in his sorrowful ‘Hymn to ...

‘What is your nation if I may ask?’

Colm Tóibín: Jews in Ireland, 30 September 1999

Jews in 20th-century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust 
by Dermot Keogh.
Cork, 336 pp., £45, March 1998, 9781859181492
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... race, they have endured a persecution the records of which will for ever remain a reproach to the Christian nations of Europe. Ireland has no share in this black record. Our country has this proud distinction – freely acknowledged by Jewish writers – of never having resorted to this un-Christian and barbarous treatment ...

Unwritten Masterpiece

Barbara Everett: Dryden’s ‘Hamlet’, 4 January 2001

... a poet’), or Defoe: the new master of a form that will all but replace poetry for a century, as Robinson Crusoe in its extreme shipwrecked mundanity throws away every heroic convention that preceded it. Robinson was born the year after Dryden, 1632. If there is, in the age of Defoe, any way forward for real poets, then it ...

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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... markets of the third quarter of the century, thereby leading to what Jack Gallagher and Ronald Robinson called informal empire or ‘the imperialism of Free Trade’. Thereafter, Britain’s determination not to copy the other European states and America, by retreating into protective tariffs, is often seen as an enlightened attachment to principle; but it ...

You must not ask

Marina Warner, 4 January 1996

Lewis Carroll: A Biography 
by Morton Cohen.
Macmillan, 592 pp., £25, November 1995, 0 333 62926 4
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The Literary Products of the Lewis Carroll-George MacDonald Friendship 
by John Docherty.
Edwin Mellen, 420 pp., £69.95, July 1995, 0 7734 9038 8
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... deliberately distanced from earlier portraits by the unprecedented use of the Christian name – is exceptional for his brains and his multiple talents, but he is an ordinary man all the same, in full command of a normal range of emotions, who was afflicted with an obsessive – but chaste – passion for little girls. Cohen rejects the ...

These people are intolerable

Richard J. Evans: Hitler and Franco, 5 November 2015

Hitler’s Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War 
by Pierpaolo Barbieri.
Harvard, 349 pp., £22.95, April 2015, 978 0 674 72885 1
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... Spanish archival material, Economic Relations between Nazi Germanyand Franco’s Spain (1996) by Christian Leitz and Franquismo y Tercer Reich (1994) by Rafael García Pérez, though the latter focuses on the period of the Second World War. The topic is also covered in nearly all of the major histories of the Spanish Civil War. It is simply wrong to ...

Hauteur

Ian Gilmour: Britain and Europe, 10 December 1998

This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair 
by Hugo Young.
Macmillan, 558 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 333 57992 5
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... apart from Roy Jenkins the other heroes are the usually unsung civil servants: Lee, O’Neill, Robinson, Butler, Palliser etc, who shepherded us into the Community with a skill and persistence which almost made up for the visionless complacency of their Forties’ and Fifties’ predecessors. Young is impressed by Heath’s ability at their crucial meeting ...

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