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Making Do and Mending

Rosemary Hill: Penelope Fitzgerald’s Letters, 25 September 2008

So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald 
edited by Terence Dooley.
Fourth Estate, 532 pp., £25, August 2008, 978 0 00 713640 7
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... Chris Carduff, who had offered to send her any books she wanted, for a copy of Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. An account of a 30,000-mile journey around the continent by two naturalists, it was originally published in 1955 and was being reissued in memory of Peterson, who had recently died. Fitzgerald wanted it, however, for the sake ...

Rough Trade

Steven Shapin: Robert Hooke, 6 March 2003

The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Strange and Inventive Life of Robert Hooke 1635-1703 
by Stephen Inwood.
Macmillan, 497 pp., £18.99, September 2002, 0 333 78286 0
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... world. Recognising that he could have IP with world-changing possibilities, Hooke went to see the King and asked him for a patent – that’s how you could secure your rights to IP in Restoration England, though it was more customary to work through Crown officials. Hooke gave the King an early version of his watch and ...
Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England 
by Stephen Greenblatt.
Oxford, 205 pp., £22.50, April 1988, 0 19 812980 7
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Representing the English Renaissance 
edited by Stephen Greenblatt.
California, 372 pp., $42, February 1988, 0 520 06129 2
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... by a statement of intent. The essays concentrate on Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, King Lear and The Tempest. Greenblatt’s method is to juxtapose famous ‘literary’ texts with lesser-known, ‘non-literary’ texts, such as Jacques Duval’s Des Hermaphrodits (1603), Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (also ...

Men in Aprons

Colin Kidd: Freemasonry, 7 May 1998

Who’s Afraid of Freemasons? The Phenomenon of Freemasonry 
by Alexander Piatigorsky.
Harvill, 398 pp., £25, August 1997, 1 86046 029 1
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... the message of restoration underpinning Masonic ritual – the rebirth in every Master Mason of King Solomon’s murdered builder Hiram Abiff – proved congenial to English Jacobites, while Philip Jenkins detects a distinctive Jacobite and Country hue in Welsh Masonry. On the other hand, John Money, a keen student of provincial clubbability, notes that ...

Freebooter

Maurice Keen: The diabolical Sir John Hawkwood, 5 May 2005

Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman 
by Frances Stonor Saunders.
Faber, 366 pp., £17.99, November 2004, 9780571219087
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... his father-in-law’s death. But there were spectacular achievements in the earlier age, too. Roger Flor, leader of the Catalan companies that overran Frankish Greece, married into the Byzantine imperial family and was hailed in Constantinople with the title ‘Caesar’. Bertrand du Guesclin, the Breton adventurer who led a mixed host of French, Gascon ...

John McEnroe plus Anyone

Edward Said: Tennis, 1 July 1999

The Right Set: The Faber Book of Tennis 
edited by Caryl Phillips.
Faber, 327 pp., £12.99, June 1999, 0 571 19540 7
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... or Drobny (to say nothing of Agassi’s erstwhile brother-in-law Gonzales) could have taken the King of Las Vegas handily, his amazing speed, anticipation and racket control notwithstanding. The core of championship tennis has always been the attacking, i.e. serve and volley game. Ground strokes were important for opening up the court, making an approach to ...

You are a milksop

Ferdinand Mount, 7 May 2020

Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate 
by Paul Lay.
Head of Zeus, 352 pp., £30, January 2020, 978 1 78185 256 9
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... of 23 April 2015). Historians are equally prone to dismiss as royalist propaganda the report by Roger Coke, grandson of the author of the Petition of Right of 1628 (which affirmed constitutional protections against an overweening monarchy), that Cromwell once called it ‘the Petition of Shite’. I can believe that one, too.When Oliver first elbowed his ...

One, Two, Three, Eyes on Me!

George Duoblys, 5 October 2017

... it.’Earlier​ this year I visited the closest thing there is to a KIPP school in the UK: King Solomon Academy in Paddington. King Solomon is run by Ark (Absolute Returns for Kids), an educational charity set up by a group of financiers in 2002. Ark runs academies across the UK, as well as a teacher-training ...

Misappropriation

Colin Kidd: Burke, 4 February 2016

Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke 
by Richard Bourke.
Princeton, 1001 pp., £30.95, September 2015, 978 0 691 14511 2
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Training Minds for the War of Ideas: Ashridge College, the Conservative Party and the Cultural Politics of Britain, 1929-54 
by Clarisse Berthezène.
Manchester, 214 pp., £75, June 2015, 978 0 7190 8649 6
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The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. IV: Party, Parliament and the Dividing of the Whigs, 1780-94 
edited by P.J. Marshall and Donald Bryant.
Oxford, 674 pp., £120, October 2015, 978 0 19 966519 8
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... that his name provided cover during the 1980s for a Tory critique of Thatcherism. High Tories like Roger Scruton, for whom the priority of laissez-faire doctrine signalled a betrayal of authentic conservatism, invoked Burke as a counterweight to Thatcher’s reading – or misreading – of Friedrich von Hayek. Thatcher’s philosophical hero was, by a further ...

From Sahib to Satan

Keith Kyle, 15 November 1984

The British Empire in the Middle East 1945-1951 
by William Roger Louis.
Oxford, 818 pp., £45, July 1984, 0 19 822489 3
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... to fill any vacuum left behind by the capsizing of British power and prestige – did not occur. Roger Louis is an American scholar who has specialised in British and Belgian colonial history in Africa and came by this route to the study of American wartime attitudes to the British colonial empire in Imperialism at Bay (1977). The present volume, which tells ...

Michael Gove recommends …

Robert Hanks: Dennis Wheatley, 20 January 2011

The Devil Is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley 
by Phil Baker.
Dedalus, 699 pp., £25, October 2009, 978 1 903517 75 8
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... of The Irish Witch (1973), for example, one of a dozen novels featuring the Napoleonic-era spy Roger Brook, is disrupted by obsessive ruminations on the use of pubic hair in love-spells and resolved by the physical manifestation of a Native American animal totem (‘The last that Roger saw of them through the mist they ...

Inhumane, Intolerant, Unclean

Ian Gilmour, 31 October 1996

A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths 
by Karen Armstrong.
HarperCollins, 474 pp., £20, July 1996, 0 00 255522 0
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Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years 
by Israel Shahak.
Pluto, 118 pp., £11.99, April 1994, 9780745308180
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City of the Great KingJerusalem from David to the Present 
edited by Nitza Rosovsky.
Harvard, 562 pp., £25.50, April 1996, 0 674 13190 8
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Jerusalem in the 20th Century 
by Martin Gilbert.
Chatto, 400 pp., £20, May 1996, 0 7011 3070 9
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Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict 
by Norman Finkelstein.
Verso, 230 pp., £39.95, December 1995, 1 85984 940 7
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To Rule Jerusalem 
by Roger Friedland and Richard Hecht.
Cambridge, 554 pp., £29.95, June 1996, 0 521 44046 7
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... and its inhabitants have frequently been massacred. Round about 1000 BC, the city was captured by King David. Assuming that he existed – and there is no archaeological or other evidence for him, or for Solomon, Moses or Joshua, outside the Bible, the relevant books of which were written hundreds of years after the events they purport to describe – David ...

Cocoa is blood and they are eating my flesh

Toby Green: Slavery and Cocoa, 11 April 2013

Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery and Colonial Africa 
by Catherine Higgs.
Ohio, 230 pp., £24.95, June 2012, 978 0 8214 2006 5
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... remain interlocked, involved in geopolitical struggles for coltan, diamonds, oil and timber. When Roger Casement visited a coffee plantation in northern Angola in 1902, he described the situation there in a report to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He found that contract workers known in Portuguese Angola as serviçais were being brought in from the ...

Short Cuts

Inigo Thomas: At the Ladbroke Arms, 22 February 2018

... The pub has become as much a restaurant as it is a place to have a drink. It is owned by Greene King, the brewing company, and run by a Polish woman who lives upstairs. It is full most evenings: customers smoking cigarettes stand on the pavement. One of the barmen is from Stettin – ‘Paris of the Baltic’, as he likes to say – and studied politics at ...

A Passion for Pears

John Sturrock, 7 July 1994

Balzac 
by Graham Robb.
Picador, 521 pp., £20, June 1994, 0 330 33237 6
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Honoré de Balzac 
by Roger Pierrot.
Fayard, 582 pp., frs 180, March 1994, 2 213 59228 4
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César Birotteau 
by Honoré de Balzac and Robin Buss.
Penguin, 279 pp., £6.99, January 1994, 0 14 044641 9
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... a thousand close-set pages of the modern edition for the three years 1845-8 alone, according to Roger Pierrot, whose sadly pedantic new biography is good for dry facts such as this, if not for very much else. Balzac wanted it to be thought that the Comédie Humaine began as a dream for the good reason that, had it in fact done so, the turning of the dream ...

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