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Not to Be Read without Shuddering

Adam Smyth: The Atheist’s Bible, 20 February 2014

The Atheist’s Bible: The Most Dangerous Book That Never Existed 
by Georges Minois, translated by Lys Ann Weiss.
Chicago, 249 pp., £21, October 2012, 978 0 226 53029 1
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... Il Cortegiano (1528) – and lists 34 titles including Edward Hoby’s Afternoon Belchings; Martin Luther’s On Shortening the Lord’s Prayer; and The Art of copying out within the compass of a Penny all the truthful statements made to that end by John Foxe. ‘With these books at your elbow,’ Donne suggests, ‘you may in almost every branch of ...

‘Equality exists in Valhalla’

Richard J. Evans: German Histories, 4 December 2014

Germany: Memories of a Nation 
by Neil MacGregor.
Allen Lane, 598 pp., £30, November 2014, 978 0 241 00833 1
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Germany: Memories of a Nation 
British Museum, until 25 January 2015Show More
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... printing press is displayed alongside a first edition of the Bible translated into German by Martin Luther. All of this testifies to a flourishing urban cultural life in the late medieval and early modern period. The Holy Roman Empire and its elaborate judicial, administrative and electoral institutions held things together only in a limited sense, as a ...

Only More So

Rosemary Hill: 1950s Women, 19 December 2013

Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties 
by Rachel Cooke.
Virago, 368 pp., £18.99, October 2013, 978 1 84408 740 2
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... sent Simon to Holland Park comprehensive, designed for the London County Council by Leslie Martin. ‘It was chaos,’ he remembers. He was bullied and his parents’ way of life embarrassed him, though later, he says, he came to see that his childhood had been ‘amazing’ – an ambiguous verdict. Other households were more experimental. Nancy Spain ...

Man on a Bicycle

Gillian Darley: Le Corbusier, 9 April 2009

Le Corbusier: A Life 
by Nicholas Fox Weber.
Knopf, 823 pp., $45, November 2008, 978 0 375 41043 7
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... walls were made of concrete shingles rather than plaster. Into this folly, not completed until the eve of the First World War, his parents poured all their savings and more. Le Corbusier was effectively trapped in the Jura; he didn’t get to Paris again until 1917. In wartime he saw himself more as an engineer than an architect, preoccupied with technical and ...

On the Dizzy Edge

Merve Emre: Helen Garner, 21 March 2019

Monkey Grip 
by Helen Garner.
Text, 333 pp., £14.99, January 2019, 978 1 925773 15 6
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The Children’s Bach 
by Helen Garner.
Text, 160 pp., £12.99, October 2018, 978 1 925773 04 0
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... you to pick your way through the raucous crowd gathered there in the summer of 1975. Here is Martin, her faithful lover, ‘teetering as many were that summer on the dizzy edge of smack’. Here is Javo, ‘just back from getting off dope in Hobart’, Lou, Selena, Georgie, Clive, Eve, Gracie – and a little boy ...

Pop, Crackle and Bang

Malcolm Gaskill: Fireworks!, 7 November 2024

A History of Fireworks: From Their Origins to the Present Day 
by John Withington.
Reaktion, 331 pp., £25, August, 978 1 78914 935 7
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... made out. Desire for ever more amazing spectacles was universal, exemplified by the career of Martin Beckman, a Swedish mercenary tasked with arranging fireworks for Charles II’s coronation in 1661; he held the post of royal fire master for the next forty years. Unfazed by confessional differences, Beckman put on great shows that lightened the royal ...

Scenario for a Wonderful Tomorrow

Wolfgang Streeck: Merkel Changes Her Mind Again, 31 March 2016

Europe’s Orphan: The Future of the Euro and the Politics of Debt 
by Martin Sandbu.
Princeton, 336 pp., £19.95, September 2015, 978 0 691 16830 2
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... decision-making, just as it would a few months later when smartphone videos of the New Year’s Eve riot at Cologne Central Station triggered another 180 degree turn in her policies. In July a PR event, part of a government campaign to encourage cabinet members to meet ordinary citizens and listen to their ideas, went wrong. One of the young people invited ...

A Monk’s-Eye View

Diarmaid MacCulloch, 10 March 2022

The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History 
by James G. Clark.
Yale, 649 pp., £25, October 2021, 978 0 300 11572 7
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Going to Church in Medieval England 
by Nicholas Orme.
Yale, 483 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 0 300 25650 5
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... in the new and more radical Reformation promoted in mainland Europe by rogue clerics such as Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli. Wolsey’s dissolutions went ahead: 29 mostly small monastic houses, nothing on the scale of Henry VIII’s later programme, but still a model for what came next. In short: monasteries into colleges. This is where Clark’s ...

On Albert Memmi

Adam Shatz, 13 August 2020

... in part to the otherwise ‘laughable’ privileges they had enjoyed under the French. (On the eve of independence, there were more than 100,000 Jews in Tunisia; today, hardly a thousand remain.) While he didn’t criticise the colonised for using violence, and mocked European liberals who did so, he didn’t see violence as shock therapy: ‘You don’t ...

The Essential Orwell

Frank Kermode, 22 January 1981

George Orwell: A Life 
by Bernard Crick.
Secker, 473 pp., £10, November 1980, 9780436114502
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Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s 
edited by Frank Gloversmith.
Harvester, 285 pp., £20, July 1980, 0 85527 938 9
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Culture and Crisis in Britain in the Thirties 
edited by Jon Clark, Margot Heinemann, David Margolies and Carole Snee.
Lawrence and Wishart, 279 pp., £3.50, March 1980, 0 85315 419 8
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... it is untrue to say that ‘Orwell was to put this thought more pithily in Animal Farm.’ Eve is talking about the possible advantages of withholding her forbidden knowledge from Adam, not about totalitarian perversions of democracy. It is even more reprehensible for a professor of politics to misquote Hobbes’s most famous remark, about the horrors ...

Brush for Hire

Eamon Duffy: Protestant painting, 19 August 2004

The Reformation of the Image 
by Joseph Leo Koerner.
Reaktion, 494 pp., £29.95, April 2004, 1 86189 172 5
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... in the very notion of a Reformation image. The movement of religious protest inaugurated by Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1517 quickly targeted the veneration of images as a damnable superstition, the idolatrous confusion of gross matter with an invisible God who was pure and eternal spirit. The 15th century had seen a great flowering of the visual ...

About Myself

Liam McIlvanney: James Hogg, 18 November 2004

The Electric Shepherd: A Likeness of James Hogg 
by Karl Miller.
Faber, 401 pp., £25, August 2003, 0 571 21816 4
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Altrive Tales 
by James Hogg, edited by Gillian Hughes.
Edinburgh, 293 pp., £40, July 2003, 0 7486 1893 7
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... Miller offers a ‘likeness’. The word is well chosen. In Hogg’s Confessions, the devilish Gil-Martin assumes the likeness of other men and penetrates their thoughts just by pondering their faces. This is close to Hogg’s practice as a writer. Impersonation, mimicry, ventriloquism: these are central to his work. Hogg forged old ballads. He parodied ...

Fraud Squad

Ferdinand Mount: Imposters, 2 August 2007

The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation 
by Rohan McWilliam.
Continuum, 363 pp., £25, March 2007, 978 1 85285 478 2
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A Romanov Fantasy: Life at the Court of Anna Anderson 
by Frances Welch.
Short Books, 327 pp., £14.99, February 2007, 978 1 904977 71 1
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The Lost Prince: The Survival of Richard of York 
by David Baldwin.
Sutton, 220 pp., £20, July 2007, 978 0 7509 4335 2
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... Maugham and Julian Symons, just as Dumas, and Boublil and Schönberg, have pounced on the story of Martin Guerre, and Verlaine, Georg Trakl and Peter Handke, not to mention a dozen playwrights and film-makers, have taken up the tale of Kaspar Hauser. These days the celebrity machine has taken over the translation business: Bottom’s dream is acted out on Big ...

Mumpsimus, Sumpsimus

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Common Prayer, 24 May 2012

Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559 and 1662 
edited by Brian Cummings.
Oxford, 830 pp., £16.99, September 2011, 978 0 19 920717 6
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... corporal form the body and blood of Christ during this service? The pope said yes – and so did Martin Luther. The Reformed said no: bread and wine were symbols of body and blood, and symbols they remained in this service. There was still much to discuss if one took this line, but the great gulf between the Reformed on the one hand, and both Lutherans and ...

Half-Finished People

Thomas Meaney: Germany Imagines Hellas, 11 October 2012

The Tyranny of Greece over Germany 
by E.M. Butler.
Cambridge, 351 pp., £23.99, March 2012, 978 1 107 69764 5
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... variant of Alfred Rosenberg and company; and the more genteel version of Gymnasium graduates like Martin Schede, the chief Nazi archaeologist, who didn’t subscribe to any Nordic-Greek theory and thought of themselves merely as adding Greek grace-notes to the German triumph. Hitler was closer to the second group. He called Rosenberg ‘a narrow-minded Baltic ...

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