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‘Where’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’

Michael Dobson: 17th-century literary culture, 11 September 2008

Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707 
by John Kerrigan.
Oxford, 599 pp., March 2008, 978 0 19 818384 6
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... the Derry of William Philips. Its historical scope is just as broad. After a final chapter on Daniel Defoe’s activities in Edinburgh in 1706-7, where he intrigued, lobbied and proselytised on behalf of the Union, Kerrigan adds a substantial epilogue exploring the interconnected histories of Britishness, Irishness, Welshness, Scottishness and ...

Big Data for the Leviathan

Tom Johnson: Counting without Numbers, 24 October 2024

By the Numbers: Numeracy, Religion and the Quantitative Transformation of Early Modern England 
by Jessica Marie Otis.
Oxford, 264 pp., £18.99, April, 978 0 19 760878 4
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... John Cannon, an 18th-century diarist, recalled his grandfather keeping his accounts with beans. Daniel Defoe claimed to know a shopkeeper who ‘knew nothing of figures, but he kept six spoons in a place on purpose, near his counter, which he took out when he had occasion to cast up any sum’.Jessica Otis’s By the Numbers surveys what she calls the ...

Games-Playing

Patrick Parrinder, 7 August 1986

The Golden Gate 
by Vikram Seth.
Faber, 307 pp., £9.95, June 1986, 0 571 13967 1
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The Haunted House 
by Rebecca Brown.
Picador, 139 pp., £8.95, June 1986, 0 330 29175 0
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Whole of a Morning Sky 
by Grace Nichols.
Virago, 156 pp., £9.95, July 1986, 0 86068 774 0
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The Piano Tuner 
by Peter Meinke.
Georgia, 156 pp., $13.95, June 1986, 0 8203 0844 7
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Tap City 
by Ron Abell.
Secker, 273 pp., £10.95, July 1986, 0 436 00025 3
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... written in the stanza form of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, made familiar to English readers by Sir Charles Johnston’s Penguin Classics translation, which Seth handsomely acknowledges. The use of this form to tell a story of contemporary Californian life would have daunted a less determined and self-assured writer – though at least ‘Onegin’ can be ...

On the Shelf

Tom Crewe: Mrs Oliphant, 16 July 2020

... being an exceptional man, i.e. a woman. When she is bad [i.e. when inventing a male character like Daniel Deronda] it is because she is a woman.’ ‘Bilingualism can be an asset,’ she concludes, ‘but its acquisition involves splits and instabilities, impersonation, a stepping out of yourself.’ If Oliphant, who never wrote under an assumed male ...

A Palm Tree, a Colour and a Mythical Bird

Robert Cioffi: Ideas of Phoenicia, 3 January 2019

In Search of the Phoenicians 
by Josephine Quinn.
Princeton, 360 pp., £27, December 2017, 978 0 691 17527 0
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... of conflict and competition. In the 18th century, as Britain became a colonial and maritime power, Daniel Defoe wrote that ‘the Phoenicians were the Englishmen of that Age.’ He even suggested that, like the British, they had colonised America. Irish claims to Phoenicianism persisted into the early part of the 20th century. Among the best-known champions of ...

The Moral Solipsism of Global Ethics Inc

Alex de Waal: Human rights, democracy and Amnesty International, 23 August 2001

Like Water on Stone: The Story of Amnesty International 
by Jonathan Power.
Allen Lane, 332 pp., £12.99, May 2001, 0 7139 9319 7
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Future Positive: International Co-operation in the 21st Century 
by Michael Edwards.
Earthscan, 292 pp., £12.99, September 2000, 1 85383 740 7
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East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia 
by Daniel Bell.
Princeton, 369 pp., £12.50, May 2000, 0 691 00508 7
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... This is Michael Edwards’s formulation, and his book, Future Positive, urges them to do better. Daniel Bell rises to this challenge in East Meets West, a series of fictional dialogues about human rights in East Asia. Bell’s East Asian interlocutors express some of the bewilderment felt by the recipients of America’s moral advice, and they offer a robust ...

Wordsworth’s Crisis

E.P. Thompson, 8 December 1988

Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years 
by Nicholas Roe.
Oxford, 306 pp., £27.50, March 1988, 0 19 812868 1
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... the Two Acts in December 1795, and in that sense – as part of an alliance which stretched from Charles James Fox through the genteel supporters of the Society for Constitutional Information to the largely shopkeeper and artisan LCS – he did perform a leading role. With a scrupulous sense of this borderline distinction, Francis Place noted down Frend as ...

Wall Furniture

Nicholas Penny: Dickens and Anti-Art, 24 May 2012

... words of Miss La Creevy in his novel. In 1839 he was able to admire his own glamorous portrait by Daniel Maclise, which was engraved for use as the frontispiece of Nicholas Nickleby when it appeared as a book in October that year. But there is no evidence that Dickens ever turned left on entering the portico and strolled around the National Gallery. He would ...

How bad can it get?

LRB Contributors: On Johnson’s Britain, 15 August 2019

... Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper ...

Disarming the English

David Wootton, 21 July 1994

To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right 
by Joyce Lee Malcolm.
Harvard, 232 pp., £23.95, March 1994, 0 674 89306 9
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... militia) and into the 19th; it lingers on, perhaps, in the cadet forces of public schools. Charles II and James II, by contrast, hoped to disarm the militia and replace it by an efficient standing army. Under William III, Parliament was persuaded that a large army was compatible with Parliamentary control of taxation, and England has had both a ...

Upper Ireland

Nicholas Canny, 16 March 1989

Modern Ireland 1600-1972 
by R.F. Foster.
Allen Lane, 688 pp., £18.95, October 1988, 0 7139 9010 4
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... from that composed by Fynes Moryson and Thomas Dineley in the 17th century through that written by Charles O’Conor and Sir Jonah Barrington in the 18th, and forward to that executed by Conrad Arensberg and Rosemary Harris in the present century. Due acknowledgement is made by Dr Foster whenever he draws upon the work of others, but he is at his best when his ...

Dreadful Sentiments

Tom Paulin, 3 April 1986

The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats. Vol. I: 1865-1895 
edited by John Kelly and Eric Domville.
Oxford, 548 pp., £22.50, January 1986, 0 19 812679 4
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... Vivid and detailed editorial notes illuminate the text, so that John O’Leary (revolutionary), Daniel Crilly (Irish Party Member for North Mayo) and Fanny Parnell (patriotic poet and sister of Charles Stewart) take on an almost fictive existence, like characters in a novel. Herbert Horne and Yeats’s view of ...

Three Weeks Wide

Rosemary Hill: A Psychohistory of France, 7 July 2022

France: An Adventure History 
by Graham Robb.
Picador, 527 pp., £25, March, 978 1 5290 0762 6
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... the ‘problem of England’ through the eyes of an unseen narrator travelling in the spirit of Daniel Defoe along paths since obstructed by nuclear power stations and motorways, Robb covers French space and time simultaneously. He passes through them like a ghost through walls, and drifts across intellectual frontiers.Robb is the author of ...

Dry-Cleaned

Tom Vanderbilt: ‘The Manchurian Candidate’, 21 August 2003

The Manchurian Candidate: BFI Film Classics 
by Greil Marcus.
BFI, 75 pp., £8.99, July 2002, 0 85170 931 1
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... directed’ man described by David Riesman, the ever distancing nature of reality in the age of Daniel Boorstin’s ‘pseudo-event’, and the seemingly hypnotic new mass medium of television. The Manchurian Candidate was the first film to film television, in a scene in which Lansbury watches her husband make accusations at a press conference, not by ...

A Dreadful Drumming

Theo Tait: Ghosts, 6 June 2013

The Undiscovered Country: Journeys among the Dead 
by Carl Watkins.
Bodley Head, 318 pp., £20, January 2012, 978 1 84792 140 6
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A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof 
by Roger Clarke.
Particular, 360 pp., £20, November 2012, 978 1 84614 333 5
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... interest of everyone from the era’s chief ghost-hunter, Joseph Glanvill, to Christopher Wren and Charles II. A Hampshire landowner called John Mompesson imprisoned William Drury, a busker and vagrant, and confiscated his drum. Mompesson’s house was then beset by terrible knockings from inside and out. Beds shook, heavy objects were thrown about, children ...

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