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Ah, la vie!

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Lytton Strachey’s letters, 1 December 2005

The Letters of Lytton Strachey 
edited by Paul Levy.
Viking, 698 pp., £30, March 2005, 0 670 89112 6
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... calls attention to the ‘shocking’ evidence of sado-masochism in his last serious affair, with Roger Senhouse, Strachey’s bent for victimisation is apparent long before the cheerful allusions to being beaten and cut. Some of the correspondence with Senhouse is disturbing, but the letter that reports the after-effects of an experiment in ...

The Way of the Warrior

Tom Shippey: Vikings, 3 April 2014

Vikings: Life and Legend 
edited by Gareth Williams, Peter Pentz and Matthias Wernhoff.
British Museum, 288 pp., £25, February 2014, 978 0 7141 2337 0
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The Northmen’s Fury 
by Philip Parker.
Cape, 450 pp., £25, March 2014, 978 0 224 09080 3
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... on ‘Belief and Ritual’ is fascinating. Anyone who has read A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok (2011), or Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen (1960), or even followed the Marvel Comics series Thor, will already know about Odin and Loki, fire giants, frost giants and the Midgard Serpent. But it’s astonishing how much of what we know comes from a single ...

Zeitgeist Man

Jenny Diski: Dennis Hopper, 22 March 2012

Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel 
by Peter Winkler.
Robson, 376 pp., £18.99, November 2011, 978 1 84954 165 7
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... is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer. James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for seven years, strangely held on to the affection of most of his mass ...

Reproaches from the Past

Peter Clarke: Gordon Brown, 1 April 2004

The Prudence of Mr Gordon Brown 
by William Keegan.
Wiley, 356 pp., £18.99, October 2003, 0 470 84697 6
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... ambiguity as well as ambition, with a premium on stealth as well as wealth. When Nigel, nephew of Roger, bishop of Salisbury, took on the job in 1126 (or thereabouts) he was simply called ‘the treasurer’. He resigned when made bishop of Ely in 1133 – not the sort of career progression to be expected these days. But the bishop of Salisbury, versatile in ...

Mathematics on Ice

Jim Holt: Infinities without End, 27 August 2009

Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity 
by Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor.
Harvard, 256 pp., £19.95, April 2009, 978 0 674 03293 4
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... reality,’ one that is ‘far more permanent than the physical reality that surrounds us’. Roger Penrose, another unabashed Platonist, holds that the natural world is only a ‘shadow’ of a realm of eternal mathematical forms. The rationale for this otherwordly view appeared first in the Republic. Geometers, Plato observed, talk of perfectly round ...

His Dark Example

Colin Burrow: ‘The Book of Dust’, 4 January 2018

The Book of Dust, Vol. I: La Belle Sauvage 
by Philip Pullman.
David Fickling, 546 pp., £20, October 2017, 978 0 385 60441 3
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Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling 
by Philip Pullman.
David Fickling, 480 pp., £20, October 2017, 978 1 910200 96 4
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... bear Iorek Byrnison. Lyra meets him in her journey north when she is trying to rescue her friend Roger from the General Oblation Board. Iorek’s ferocity and unshakeable instinct for what is true makes him morally terrifying in the way truly admirable creatures are: they make you a little afraid because there are no exceptions or exclusions, and you know ...

At the Amsterdam

Steven Shapin: A Wakefull and Civill Drink, 20 April 2006

The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffee House 
by Brian Cowan.
Yale, 364 pp., £25, January 2006, 0 300 10666 1
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Coffee House: A Cultural History 
by Markman Ellis.
Phoenix, 304 pp., £8.99, November 2005, 0 7538 1898 1
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... and, if the neighbourhood did not make it socially pretty samey, then the outrageous price of the latte did. No one was smoking – it’s banned – and many of the customers were women. All of this makes the coffee house I go to a very different sort of place from those that proliferated in London from the middle of the 17th century; but ...

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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... was probably the nature of the thumb-sized toy encountered in 1267 by the Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon, who, with forgivable exaggeration, recorded a noise ‘exceeding the roar of strong thunder and a flash brighter than the most brilliant lightning’. Paper could also be wrapped around canvas compartments to add stages to a firework’s incandescent ...

The Arrestables

Jeremy Harding: Extinction Rebellion, 16 April 2020

... a bridge or shutting down a stretch of Oxford Street, as they did in 2019. Both Gail Bradbrook and Roger Hallam, two of the movement’s founding activists, have been exemplary arrestables. Arrests, they argue, are the necessary price for refusing a police order to move, and if enough people are detained, police stations and ...

The Dark Side of Brazilian Conviviality

Perry Anderson, 24 November 1994

... in the world at large, came to the Faculty in São Paulo: Lévi-Strauss, Braudel, Pierre Monbeig, Roger Bastide, Claude Lefort, Michel Foucault. The deepest local imprint was left in philosophy, where a set of outstanding instructors trained a generation of thinkers, vividly memorialised in a recent work by Paulo Eduardo Arantes as Um Departamento Francês de ...

Undertellers

Walter Nash, 18 February 1988

The Panda Hunt 
by Richard Burns.
Cape, 189 pp., £10.95, August 1987, 0 224 02445 0
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Davy Chadwick 
by James Buchan.
Hamish Hamilton, 145 pp., £9.95, September 1987, 0 241 12115 9
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Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris 
by Mavis Gallant.
Cape, 196 pp., £10.95, August 1987, 0 224 02426 4
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Black Idol 
by Lisa St Aubin de Teran.
Cape, 157 pp., £9.95, September 1987, 9780224024372
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... a familiar voice, came snuffling at the door, expecting at this unsuitable hour to be taken out. Roger remarked, ‘Whatever happens, don’t get your life all mixed up with a dog’s.’ That is also stylish after its own fashion – a fashion that calls upon us compassionately to interpret the undertold tale. One’s first impression of Black Idol is of ...

Going Straight

Neal Ascherson, 17 March 1983

After Long Silence 
by Michael Straight.
Collins, 351 pp., £11.95, March 1983, 0 00 217001 9
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A Matter of Trust: MI5 1945-72 
by Nigel West.
Weidenfeld, 196 pp., £8.95, December 1982, 0 297 78253 3
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... but says: ‘I believed simply that the acceptance of individual responsibility is the price we must all pay for living in a free society ... I was convinced ... that sooner or later, my one-time comrades would wish to sever themselves from any shred of allegiance to the Soviet Union.’ Blunt asked to talk to him for a few minutes alone before the ...

Teacher

John Passmore, 4 September 1986

Australian Realism: The Systematic Philosophy of John Anderson 
by A.J. Baker.
Cambridge, 150 pp., £20, April 1986, 0 521 32051 8
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... claim to be civilised. A colonial Bloomsbury? There were common influences, to be sure – Roger Fry, as well as Moore – and some shared values. But Anderson was a Scot, we were Australians. We did not have the Bloomsbury tendency to preciousness: that is the last adjective one would think of applying either to Anderson or to those who learnt from ...

Verie Sillie People

Keith Thomas: Bacon’s Lives, 7 February 2013

The Oxford Francis Bacon Vol. I: Early Writings 1584-96 
edited by Alan Stewart, with Harriet Knight.
Oxford, 1066 pp., £200, September 2012, 978 0 19 818313 6
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... no payment for his vast labours, but was allowed to buy copies of the finished work at the trade price. He professed to have no complaints on that score, but in other respects his experience with his publishers was unhappy. He disliked the practice of issuing the volumes as numbered parts of a series rather than as individual titles. He hated the ...

Forever on the Wrong Side

R.W. Johnson: Jean Suret-Canale, 27 September 2012

Suret-Canale: de la Résistance a l’anticolonialisme 
by Pascal Bianchini.
L’Esprit Frappeur, 253 pp., €14, March 2011, 978 2 84405 244 5
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... director of the PCF’s Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Marxistes (CERM). CERM’s director, Roger Garaudy, was a high-profile, very médiatique liberal communist. For a while, he and Suret got on well, but in time his arrogance became too much for Suret. ‘At bottom,’ Suret said later, ‘he wanted to be Sartre, that’s to say, at once a great ...

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