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The Old Corrector

Richard Altick, 4 November 1982

Fortune and Men’s Eyes: The Career of John Payne Collier 
by Dewey Ganzel.
Oxford, 454 pp., £15, October 1982, 0 19 212231 2
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... in his career, he was exceedingly vulnerable to attack, the more so because his considerable powers as a controversialist seemed to desert him whenever he found himself on the defensive. His numerous enemies had their knives ready for him: but he had helped unsheathe them. In the perilous atmosphere of Shakespeare studies in the Early Victorian ...

Magnanimity

Richard Altick, 3 December 1981

The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman 
by Mark Girouard.
Yale, 312 pp., £12.50, September 1981, 0 300 02739 7
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... lively surface. No concession to academic solemnity, let alone any faith in the truth-revealing powers of psychohistory, would have been necessary to confront the question that hovers over every page: why this persistent fascination with dreams of a world that existed only in literature, and of an idealism that certainly could not be realised in the modern ...

Spot and Sink

Richard J. Evans: The End of WW1, 15 December 2011

With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 
by David Stevenson.
Allen Lane, 688 pp., £30, May 2011, 978 0 7139 9840 5
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... during the summer by the arrival of large numbers of American troops. By November, the Central Powers were outnumbered by the Allies on the Western Front by a factor of nearly two to one. It was this growing disparity in numbers, in addition to the potential deployment of a vast army of tanks, which most worried Ludendorff, and prompted him to launch the ...

Staying Alive in the Ruins

Richard J. Evans: Plato to Nato, 22 April 2021

Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after World War Two 
by Paul Betts.
Profile, 536 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 1 78816 109 1
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... postwar reactions to Nazi atrocities had threatened to obliterate – this helped the occupying powers in their efforts to ‘re-educate’ ordinary Germans. While the British adhered to the well-established concept of the ‘two Germanies’, and tried to bring out the civilised tradition of Beethoven and Goethe while suppressing the uncivilised tradition ...

So long, Lalitha

James Lever: Franzen’s Soap Opera, 7 October 2010

Freedom 
by Jonathan Franzen.
Fourth Estate, 562 pp., £20, September 2010, 978 0 00 726975 4
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... player. Here she meets the dweeby, good-hearted Walter Berglund and his charismatic best friend Richard Katz, lead singer and guitarist of art-punk band the Traumatics. Richard loves Walter because of his moral seriousness; Walter loves Richard because everyone does, including ...

The Judges’ Verdicts

Stephen Sedley, 2 February 2017

... of the royal prerogative, that has shaped the British constitution.In 1636 a London trader called Richard Chambers sued the mayor for having wrongfully imprisoned him for refusing to pay ship money. His case was that the tax was itself unlawful, having been levied by the Crown without the authority of Parliament. The court refused to hear the ...

At the Funfair

Peter Campbell: ‘Winter Wonderland’, 7 January 2010

... steel sculptures are prodigies of industrial metalwork, and while part of the attraction of Richard Serra’s huge steel slabs comes from an awe like that one feels in treading the narrow defile of a river-cut canyon, the challenge they offer to ideas about the limits of human powers of fabrication is part of it ...

New World Chaos

Rodric Braithwaite, 24 January 2013

Governing the World: The History of an Idea 
by Mark Mazower.
Allen Lane, 475 pp., £25, October 2012, 978 0 7139 9683 8
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... Alliance, working through caucuses of diplomats meeting in secret, prevented war between the great powers until the system broke down in the Crimea. It was a more collegiate way of managing the old balance of power, but it did nothing to promote the liberties of nations and peoples. On the contrary, it was, in the eyes of many liberals, a conspiracy to ...

Heavenly Cities

Daniel Aaron, 10 October 1991

The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities 
by Richard Sennett.
Faber, 266 pp., £17.50, June 1991, 0 571 16192 8
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... For the last thirty years Richard Sennett – urban sociologist, historian, novelist – has been meditating on the culture and ecology of industrial cities: on how they evolved, on how their physical organisation and social structure related to the psychological and moral experiences of their inhabitants. More pointedly than his previous books, The Conscience of the Eye, he says, aims to show the interactions between the ‘architectural, urban planning, public sculpture, and the visual scenes of the city’ and its ‘cultural life ...

Smuggled in a Warming Pan

Stephen Sedley: The Glorious Revolution, 24 September 2015

The Glorious Revolution and the Continuity of Law 
by Richard Kay.
Catholic University of America, 277 pp., £45, December 2014, 978 0 8132 2687 3
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... In​ 1944, as Richard Kay records, an optimistic litigant challenged the validity of a Victorian statute under which he was being sued, on the ground that Queen Victoria, like all her predecessors since 1689, had had no title to the throne. The argument, which would have wiped the statute book almost clean, was dismissed without much ceremony; but in 1688 and 1689 it occupied the centre of the political and constitutional stage ...

No Law at All

Stephen Sedley: The Governor Eyre Affair, 2 November 2006

A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law 
by R.W. Kostal.
Oxford, 529 pp., £79.95, December 2005, 0 19 826076 8
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... certainly had. It was ostensibly about the unnecessary duration of the decree and the abuse of the powers it created; but neither of these features distinguished it from the measures adopted in response to other such risings. What gave the outrage a focus was that Eyre had personally authorised the arrest in Kingston of a man named George Gordon, and what ...

Cosmic Interference

Dinah Birch: Janet Davey’s Fiction, 8 October 2015

Another Mother’s Son 
by Janet Davey.
Chatto, 296 pp., £12.99, August 2015, 978 1 78474 022 1
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... haunted by his own mother’s death. He is compulsively promiscuous, but not without rudimentary powers of sympathy, exercised to the full as he chooses prospective partners. ‘Past thirty, a moderate showing of low spirits was a good sign, he always thought, promising worldliness and some experience with men.’ Such moments of rueful humour sporadically ...

With Constantinople as Its Objective

Richard Prior and Trevor Wilson: Lord Kitchener and Winston Churchill, 14 January 2002

Lord Kitchener and Winston Churchill: The Dardanelles Commission Part I, 1914-15 
Stationery Office, 218 pp., £6.99, April 2000, 0 11 702423 6Show More
Defeat at Gallipoli: The Dardanelles Commission Part II, 1915-16 
Stationery Office, 319 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 11 702455 4Show More
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... creative tactics designed to maximise the impact of offensive weapons and diminish the enemy’s powers of defence; and the thoroughgoing mobilisation for war of the vast industries of Britain and the US. Gallipoli and the Dardanelles had nothing to do with it. The Dardanelles Commission could hardly engage these large matters. And so, to return to the ...

Which play was performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?

Blair Worden: A Play for Plotters, 10 July 2003

... rebellion. ‘The play,’ he averred, ‘was of King Harry the 4th, and of the killing of King Richard II.’ Third, on 18 February, one of the players, Augustine Phillips, in signed testimony given under oath, described the play as ‘the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II’. Fourth, at Meyrick’s ...

A British Bundesrat?

Colin Kidd: Scotland and the Constitution, 17 April 2014

... have been major investigations in Scotland (the Calman Commission of 2007-8) and Wales – the Richard Commission (2002-4), the Holtham Commission (2007-10) and the Silk Commission (2011-14) – into the broader operation of devolution and the funding mechanisms that support it. Anxiety has focused not only on relations between Westminster and the ...

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