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With Bit and Bridle

Matthew Kelly: 18th-Century Ireland, 5 August 2010

Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves 
by Ian McBride.
Gill and Macmillan, 563 pp., £19.99, October 2009, 978 0 7171 1627 0
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... On 12 March 1689, James II, the deposed king of England and Ireland, Catholic and absolutist, landed at Kinsale on the south coast of Ireland with a substantial French force. He had fled England a few months before when William and Mary had been declared joint sovereigns – the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution ...

Naderland

Jackson Lears: Ralph Nader’s novel, 8 April 2010

Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 
by Ralph Nader.
Seven Stories, 733 pp., $27.50, September 2009, 978 1 58322 903 3
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... told the sordid tale of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, as well as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of 1912 proposed to renew entrepreneurial opportunities through anti-trust and regulatory policies. He recalls a certain kind of populist ...

The Darth Vader Option

Colin Kidd: The Tories, 24 January 2013

The Conservatives since 1945: The Drivers of Party Change 
by Tim Bale.
Oxford, 372 pp., £55, September 2012, 978 0 19 923437 0
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The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron 
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 471 pp., £14.99, January 2011, 978 0 7456 4858 3
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Reconstructing Conservatism? The Conservative Party in Opposition, 1997-2010 
by Richard Hayton.
Manchester, 166 pp., £60, September 2012, 978 0 7190 8316 7
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... was the scene of a ‘strange and recurring tragedy’ which provided the point of departure for James Frazer’s anthropological classic, The Golden Bough. The grove was guarded by a wary figure, a priest and a murderer, ever on his guard against an assailant who would try to murder him in order to take his place: ‘Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A ...

A Cheat, a Sharper and a Swindler

Brian Young: Warren Hastings, 24 May 2001

Dawning of the Raj: The Life and Trials of Warren Hastings 
by Jeremy Bernstein.
Aurum, 319 pp., £19.99, March 2001, 1 85410 753 4
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... works on Hindu law and Charles Wilkins’s pioneering translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. When Sir William Jones, the inspirational instigator of Indo-European studies, arrived in Bengal as a judge, Hastings was one of his strongest supporters. Though it has long been fashionable to denigrate such work as being Orientalist, it’s difficult to find anything in ...

Travelling Text

Marina Warner: ‘The Arabian Nights’, 18 December 2008

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights 
translated by Malcolm Lyons, with Ursula Lyons.
Penguin, 2715 pp., £125, November 2008, 978 0 14 091166 4
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‘The Arabian Nights’ in Historical Context: Between East and West 
edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum.
Oxford, 337 pp., £55, November 2008, 978 0 19 955415 7
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... translators, notably the English Arabist Edward Lane, whose three-volume edition, illustrated with William Harvey’s fine steel engravings, was published between 1838 and 1841. I have a copy of this translation, which came from my great-grandfather’s library, and it’s one of the few books I owned as a child and have been reading ever since. Despite ...

Abishag’s Revenge

Steven Shapin: Who wants to live for ever?, 26 March 2009

Mortal Coil: A Short History of Living Longer 
by David Boyd Haycock.
Yale, 308 pp., £18.99, June 2008, 978 0 300 11778 3
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... medical professor Hermann Boerhaave and the German Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland in the 18th century. James Copeland, an English medical authority who was quoted as late as the 20th century on ‘the transference of vital power’, warned that young women married to old men suffered debilitation and shortened longevity: ‘These facts are often well known to the ...

At the House of Mr Frog

Malcolm Gaskill: Puritanism, 18 March 2021

The Puritans: A Transatlantic History 
by David D. Hall.
Princeton, 517 pp., £20, May 2021, 978 0 691 20337 9
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The Journey to the Mayflower: God’s Outlaws and the Invention of Freedom 
by Stephen Tomkins.
Hodder, 372 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 4736 4911 8
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... and courage dictated. It helped their enemies that some puritans were not only flaky but mad. William Hacket, a maltster, boasted of wrestling lions at the Tower of London, and supposedly once bit off a schoolmaster’s nose (and swallowed it). He progressed from mimicking radical preachers to providing exorcisms and false prophecy; finally, he claimed to ...

Stainless Steel Banana Slicer

David Trotter, 18 March 2021

Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form 
by Sianne Ngai.
Harvard, 401 pp., £28.95, June 2020, 978 0 674 98454 7
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... Theory of the Gimmick concludes, boldly and brilliantly, with a meticulous analysis of Henry James’s late fiction. Ngai has noticed that the investigations of opaque social and moral circumstance conducted in these novels and stories have the effect of exposing an over-reliance, in times of emergency, on waged and unwaged care-providers whose work is ...

Friends with Benefits

Tom Stevenson: The Five Eyes, 19 January 2023

The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the Shadowy International Spy Network, through Its Targets, Traitors and Spies 
by Richard Kerbaj.
John Blake, 416 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 1 78946 503 7
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Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena 
by Clinton Fernandes.
Melbourne, 176 pp., £35.95, October 2022, 978 0 522 87926 1
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... with American security officials with the help of the Canadian-born pilot turned industrialist William Samuel Stephenson. The plan was for American and British intelligence agencies to share the burden of monitoring the world by drawing up zones of influence – a version of the principle still applies today. In 1940, ...

Itch to Shine

Freya Johnston: Austen’s Suitors, 20 March 2025

Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen 
by Rory Muir.
Yale, 407 pp., £25, February 2024, 978 0 300 26960 4
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... had a keen sense of what her characters did next was revealed by her nephew and early biographer, James Edward Austen-Leigh. He reported that Austen told her family: ‘Mr Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage and kept her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell about two years.’Most readers of Austen’s fiction feel instinctively that her ...

The devil has two horns

J.G.A. Pocock, 24 February 1994

The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke 
by Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Minerva, 692 pp., £8.99, September 1993, 0 7493 9721 7
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... them. These claims were kept up by Rockingham and Burke as long as the former lived, by Charles James Fox and Burke thereafter, and by Fox after his breach with Burke over the French Revolution. They always carried intimations of improper royal behaviour, and came to amount to the claim that the King should accept his ministers from Parliament and should ...

We did and we didn’t

Seamus Perry: Are yez civilised?, 6 May 2021

On Seamus Heaney 
by R.F. Foster.
Princeton, 228 pp., £14.99, September 2020, 978 0 691 17437 2
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... Heaney didn’t feature in the first version of Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage (1974), Clive James’s satire on British literary life; but in the ‘improved version’, just two years later, he has become a fixture of the scene, ‘SEAMUS FEAMUS’, pictured tucking into a pub lunch of ‘two slabs of peat around a conger eel’ (‘Clive was very ...

Good Fibs

Andrew O’Hagan: Truman Capote, 2 April 1998

Truman Capote: In which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career 
by George Plimpton.
Picador, 498 pp., £20, February 1998, 0 330 36871 0
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... his ‘special writers’, just so as they’d have somewhere to spread their elbows in New York. William Faulkner was never out of there. Always at night. Always drunk. But one morning even Cerf got fed up with the brewery toxins in the office hum. He took back the key. Another of Cerf’s specials, Truman Capote, a young goldfish new-swimming into the ...

Hyacinth Boy

Mark Ford: T.S. Eliot, 21 September 2006

T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet 
by James E. Miller.
Pennsylvania State, 468 pp., £29.95, August 2005, 0 271 02681 2
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The Annotated ‘Waste Land’ with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose 
by T.S. Eliot, edited by Lawrence Rainey.
Yale, 270 pp., $35, April 2005, 0 300 09743 3
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Revisiting ‘The Waste Land’ 
by Lawrence Rainey.
Yale, 203 pp., £22.50, May 2005, 0 300 10707 2
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... Tristan und Isolde suggests: ‘Öd’ und leer das Meer’ (‘Desolate and empty the sea’). James Miller was the first critic inspired by Peter’s speculations and the appearance of the drafts to attempt a thorough outing of Eliot. His T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land (1977) offered ‘new interpretations’ of much of Eliot’s early work, and found ...

Forget the Dylai Lama

Thomas Jones: Bob Dylan, 6 November 2003

Dylan's Visions of Sin 
by Christopher Ricks.
Viking, 517 pp., £25, October 2003, 9780670801336
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... His discussion of it, in the chapter on ‘Justice’, is the centrepiece of his book. ‘William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll,’ the song begins, ‘with a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger.’ ‘William Zanzinger had 24 years/Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres’; Hattie Carroll ...

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