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A Spot of Firm Government

Terry Eagleton: Claude Rawson, 23 August 2001

God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination 1492-1945 
by Claude Rawson.
Oxford, 401 pp., £25, June 2001, 0 19 818425 5
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... turned, from which some semblance of pre-modern Gemeinschaft might still just about be salvaged. Richard Steele, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, Francis Hutcheson and Edmund Burke all made vital Irish contributions to this nouvelle vague of meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and ...

Hm, hm and that was all

Rosemary Hill: Queen Mary, 6 December 2018

The Quest for Queen Mary 
by James Pope-Hennessy, edited by Hugo Vickers.
Zuleika, 335 pp., £25, September 2018, 978 1 9997770 3 6
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... and by 1953 had established a reputation as a biographer. Two volumes on the life of Richard Monckton-Milnes, the late Georgian politician and socialite, were followed by a life of Monckton-Milnes’s son, Lord Crewe. The latter was the quid pro quo for access to the archives and was, Pope-Hennessy admitted, ‘less than inspired’. Its ...

Ghosts of the Tsunami

Richard Lloyd Parry, 6 February 2014

... were exclusively on Tohoku subjects. Prominent among his authors was the academic Norio Akasaka, a stern critic of the policies of the central government towards the region. These had been starkly illuminated by the nuclear disaster in Fukushima: an industrial plant erected by Tokyo, supplying electricity to the capital, and now spitting radiation over people ...

Warmer, Warmer

John Lanchester: Global Warming, Global Hot Air, 22 March 2007

The Revenge of Gaia 
by James Lovelock.
Allen Lane, 222 pp., £8.99, February 2007, 978 0 14 102597 1
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Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis Summary for Policymakers: Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 
IPCC, February 2007Show More
Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning 
by George Monbiot.
Allen Lane, 277 pp., £17.99, September 2006, 0 7139 9923 3
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The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies 
by Richard Heinberg.
Clairview, 320 pp., £12.99, October 2005, 1 905570 00 7
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The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review 
by Nicholas Stern.
Cambridge, 692 pp., £29.99, January 2007, 978 0 521 70080 1
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... apparent eagerness to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and when Richard Nixon got to the White House four years later he was convinced that scientists were a dangerously anti-Republican political lobby. Nixon shut down the Office of Science and Technology, and kicked the presidential science adviser out of the cabinet – an ...

Can there be such a thing as music criticism?

John Deathridge, 20 February 1986

Music and Civilisation: Essays in Honour of Paul Henry Lang 
edited by Edmond Strainchamps, Maria Rika Maniates and Christopher Hatch.
Norton, 499 pp., £35, March 1985, 0 393 01677 3
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The Farthest North of Humanness: Letters of Percy Grainger 1901-1914 
edited by Kay Dreyfus.
Macmillan, 542 pp., £25, December 1985, 0 333 38085 1
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Musicology 
by Joseph Kerman.
Collins/Fontana, 255 pp., £10.95, March 1985, 0 00 197170 0
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... and music patron Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the guardian angel of Mozart’s late style. Richard Taruskin accuses Stravinsky of lying about the original idea of The Rite of Spring, which was visual and frankly ‘Scriabinistic’ rather than purely musical. In various autobiographical statements Stravinsky dismissed the help of Nicholas Roerich in ...

Can a rabbit talk to a cat?

Julian Barnes: Lartigue takes a leap, 7 April 2022

Lartigue: The Boy and the Belle Époque 
by Louise Baring.
Thames and Hudson, 192 pp., £28, April 2020, 978 0 500 02130 9
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Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of Happiness 
by Denis Curti, Marion Perceval and Charles-Antoine Revol.
Marsilio, 208 pp., £40, July 2020, 978 88 297 0527 6
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... mid-leap over a flight of stone steps. Decades later, and self-referentially, Lartigue persuaded Richard Avedon to launch himself upwards, camera in hand, with a curling whip of flash cable snaking about in the air.The world he took part in and portrayed was one where Zola ran into Colette, where Nana met Gigi. And the names – or rather, the nicknames ...

‘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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... the whale dived beneath the ship and resurfaced off the starboard quarter, floating beside the stern. It appeared stunned. Chase grabbed a lance – a blade long enough to reach the heart through several feet of blubber – but realised that the creature was too close, and if he speared it its flukes might damage the rudder as it thrashed about in its ...

Red silk is the best blood

David Thomson: Sondheim, 16 December 2010

Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-81), with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes 
by Stephen Sondheim.
Virgin, 445 pp., £30, October 2010, 978 0 7535 2258 5
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... lyricists who have violated his strict code on the way words should be put to music – as well as stern instructions on keeping your rhymes in order. The book builds a portrait of a cool, almost chilly master. He says he loves collaboration, but you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of his waspish principles. He is a wizard, but not a gentle or benign ...

Deliverology

David Runciman: Blair Hawks His Wares, 31 March 2016

Broken Vows: Tony Blair – The Tragedy of Power 
by Tom Bower.
Faber, 688 pp., £20, March 2016, 978 0 571 31420 1
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... quick to castigate others for their slapdash approach. Later he refers in passing to ‘Nicholas Stern, a civil servant, [who] published an error-strewn review in 2006 warning about the dangers of climate change’. He provides no evidence for this contemptuous verdict, and no source: presumably someone said it to him in passing during one of his many ...

Down with Weathercocks

Tom Stammers: Mother Revolution, 30 November 2017

Liberty or Death: The French Revolution 
by Peter McPhee.
Yale, 468 pp., £14.99, July 2017, 978 0 300 22869 4
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... to be more powerful than kings.’The cacophony of voices in McPhee’s book recalls the work of Richard Cobb; it shows a similar sensitivity to regional variation and delight in anarchic individualism. McPhee offsets popular devotion to the revolution with evidence of apathy, frustration and profanity. ‘Vive le roi! The republic can get fucked,’ one ...

What did happen?

David Edgar: Ukraine, 21 January 2016

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine 
by Serhii Plokhy.
Allen Lane, 381 pp., £25, December 2015, 978 0 241 18808 8
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In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine 
by Tim Judah.
Allen Lane, 256 pp., £20, January 2016, 978 0 241 19882 7
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Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West 
by Andrew Wilson.
Yale, 236 pp., £12.99, October 2014, 978 0 300 21159 7
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Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands 
by Richard Sakwa.
I.B. Tauris, 297 pp., £9.99, January 2015, 978 1 78453 527 8
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... went ape.’ This view is challenged in the other immediate response to the 2013-14 events, Richard Sakwa’s Frontline Ukraine. Sakwa has reservations about the 2004 Orange Revolution; the question of whether it was a people’s revolution or a revolutionary coup ‘remains pertinent to this day’. The Maidan uprising began as a protest against the ...

Bebop

Andrew O’Hagan, 5 October 1995

Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940-56 
edited by Ann Charters.
Viking, 629 pp., £25, August 1995, 0 670 84952 9
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... Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore headphones; all you could hear was the giggles and gasps. On ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Selling my hair on eBay, 6 January 2022

... read:Revelations, the biography of Francis Bacon, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn SwanA Curious Boy, Richard ForteyTurning the Boat for Home, Richard MabeyThe Stonemason, Andrew ZiminskiKiss Myself Goodbye, Ferdinand MountWhat Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, Mark DotyPastoral, James RebanksPhilip Roth, Blake ...

Unusual Endowments

Patrick Collinson, 30 March 2000

Philip Sidney: A Double Life 
by Alan Stewart.
Chatto, 400 pp., £20, February 2000, 0 7011 6859 5
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... a schoolboy received from his ‘loving father, so long as you live in the fear of God’, full of stern expectations; and about the suppressed rebelliousness of his relations with other older men, especially Languet. In Richard McCoy’s Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (1979), the conflict between self-assertion and ...

Masses and Classes

Ferdinand Mount: Gladstone, 17 February 2005

The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics 
by David Bebbington.
Oxford, 331 pp., £55, March 2004, 0 19 926765 0
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... his biographers in dismissing them in a page or two as ‘somewhat crackbrained’, to quote Richard Shannon. Shannon’s two-volume life offers a fuller account of Gladstone’s intellectual development than other modern biographies, yet even he allots as much space to Macaulay’s mesmerisingly destructive review of The State in Its Relations with the ...

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