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Positively Spaced Out

Rosemary Hill: ‘The Building of England’, 6 September 2001

The Buildings of England: A Celebration Compiled to Mark 50 Years of the Pevsner Architectural Guides 
edited by Simon Bradley and Bridget Cherry.
Penguin Collectors’ Society, 128 pp., £9.99, July 2001, 0 9527401 3 3
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... Conrad but does little to characterise him as a writer.At the Architectural Review in the 1930s, James Richards had found editing Pevsner’s articles hard work. By the end of the war he was fluent, but his use of English retains a sense of discovery and the flexibility of a mature intellect expressing itself with the vitality of youth. Pevsner was still ...

Living on Apple Crumble

August Kleinzahler: James Schuyler, 17 November 2005

Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951-91 
edited by William Corbett.
Turtle Point, 470 pp., £13.99, May 2005, 1 885586 30 2
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... the 8 p.m. cup of cocoa.’ The letter was written on 15 November 1951, a few days after James Schuyler had been admitted to Bloomingdale Hospital, a mental institution in White Plains, New York. Schuyler still gets his semi-colons right, and his appetite for gossip is undiminished: ‘Is it still Connecticut, the dear deer, the steady lay, the ...

Diary

Michael Dobson: The Russell-Cotes, 23 February 2012

... had also noticed that some of the theatrical portraits the Russell-Coteses had collected, such as James Archer’s Henry Irving as Charles I (1873) and John Collier’s Lewis Waller as Monsieur Beaucaire (1903), were really very fine. I had also begun to feel defensive about genre painting, which seemed to be eminently respectable when executed by ...

Diary

Rosemary Hill: Aboriginal Voices, 14 December 2023

... doubled down, accusing the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, of having ‘misread the nation’. Simon Birmingham, leader of the opposition in the Senate, interpreted the result as a sign that ‘Australians put a premium on practical action’; the Liberal Party has called for a Royal Commission on child abuse in Indigenous communities. The defeated Yes ...

Stop talking englissh

Marion Turner: Medieval Polyglots, 9 May 2024

Fixers: Agency, Translation and the Early Global History of Literature 
by Zrinka Stahuljak.
Chicago, 345 pp., £85, February, 978 0 226 83039 1
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... Persian, Koman, Chaldean and other ‘schismatic languages’ in order to aid conversion. In 1276 James II of Aragon agreed to found a monastery at Miramar in Majorca for the study of Eastern languages, and Llull himself travelled to Tunis, Cyprus, Armenia and Libya. At the Council of Vienne in 1311, the Catholic Church decided to set up chairs in ...

Himbo

James Davidson: Apollonios Rhodios, 5 March 1998

Apollonios Rhodios: The Argonautika 
translated by Peter Green.
California, 480 pp., £45, November 1997, 0 520 07686 9
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... rode up in the Eighties. Chief among the leaders of this mission are the Cambridge classicists Simon Goldhill and Richard Hunter, who has written a book on Apollonius (The ‘Argonautica’ of Apollonius: Literary Studies, 1993) as well as producing a scholarly edition of Book Three and a translation of the whole thing (which is already, ominously, out of ...

The Great Dissembler

James Wood: Thomas More’s Bad Character, 16 April 1998

The Life of Thomas More 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Chatto, 435 pp., £20, March 1998, 1 85619 711 5
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... identical with heresy, when he, an early anti-clerical, knew this to be untrue. In reply to one Simon Fish, who had argued that England’s travails had to do with the greed and idleness of the clergy, More claimed that things were much the same as they had always been, and then appealed to Henry VIII’s vanity as Defender of the Faith to stamp out the ...

Bring some Madeira

Thomas Keymer: Thomas Love Peacock, 8 February 2018

Nightmare Abbey 
by Thomas Love Peacock, edited by Nicholas A. Joukovsky.
Cambridge, 297 pp., £84.99, December 2016, 978 1 107 03186 9
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Crotchet Castle 
by Thomas Love Peacock, edited by Freya Johnston and Matthew Bevis.
Cambridge, 328 pp., £79.99, December 2016, 978 1 107 03072 5
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... of Threevotes; Peter Paypaul Paperstamp, the sinecure-seeking poet of Mainchance Villa; Sir Simon Steeltrap, scourge of poachers on his hunting estate at Spring-gun and Treadmill. Some of the names indicate real-life targets such as George Canning, the Tory statesman who started out as the attack dog of the Anti-Jacobin, and Wordsworth, whose acceptance ...

Glimpsed in the Glare

Michael Neill: Shakespeare in 1606, 17 December 2015

1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear 
by James Shapiro.
Faber, 423 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 0 571 23578 0
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... surprisingly elaborate constructions are erected, whether shaped by the genial indulgence of what Simon Russell-Beale called Greenblatt’s ‘love letter’ to Shakespeare, or by the hard-nosed iconoclasm of Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Ungentle Shakespeare (2001), whose determination ‘to bring Shakespeare down from the lofty isolation to which he has ...

Henry Hill and Laura Palmer

Philip Horne, 20 December 1990

... warning – in mid-joke) could never have been told: neither as a book (Hill sold his account to Simon and Schuster to pay his legal bills), nor as a film. It is, moreover, a story worth telling, one which goes some way towards answering, at the non-theological level, Jeffrey’s wonder ‘Why are there people like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in this ...

Following the Fall-Out

Alexander Star: Rick Moody, 19 March 1998

Purple America 
by Rick Moody.
Flamingo, 298 pp., £16.99, March 1998, 0 00 225687 8
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... pen mark on the designer pantsuit she’d bought for the holidays, by the slight warp in her Paul Simon album, or by the acrid taste of old ice cubes. These small things led to a bottomless pit of loneliness beside which even Cambodia paled. As for the children, they are sombrely aware that ‘family was a bluff, a series of futile power grabs.’ Much of ...

Farewell to the Log Cabin

Colin Kidd: America’s Royalist Revolution, 18 December 2014

The Royalist Revolution 
by Eric Nelson.
Harvard, 390 pp., £22.95, October 2014, 978 0 674 73534 7
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... which have lurked in plain view in the text of the Constitution since 1787. Figures such as James Wilson and Alexander Hamilton, and outside the convention itself, John Adams, James Iredell and Benjamin Rush, did not comprise a party as such, indeed they had their disagreements; but they shared a set of ideas derived ...

All change. This train is cancelled

Iain Sinclair: The Dome, 13 May 1999

... boats from nostalgic black and white photographs. It was an unoptioned metaphor with its own poet, Simon Armitage, hired to knock up a thousand-line tribute. Time drifted. The 12 minutes of the virtual reality journey in the brochures was actually the time between trains, the time spent enjoying the strange termini in which potential travellers are ...

Libel on the Human Race

Steven Shapin: Malthus, 5 June 2014

Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet 
by Robert Mayhew.
Harvard, 284 pp., £20, April 2014, 978 0 674 72871 4
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... he married his first cousin once removed, and then quickly fathered three children. Patricia James, the author of the still definitive biography Population Malthus (1979), speculates that Malthus’s domestic situation stamped itself on his demographic imagination – though many similarly placed younger sons among professional men at the time found the ...

Booze and Fags

Christopher Hitchens, 12 March 1992

Tobacco: A History 
by V.G. Kiernan.
Radius, 249 pp., £18.99, December 1991, 0 09 174216 1
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The Faber Book of Drink, Drinkers and Drinking 
edited by Simon Rae.
Faber, 554 pp., £15.99, November 1991, 0 571 16229 0
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... The population is praised for puffing its way stoically through the shrieking pieties of King James I, whose pamphlet on the matter warned loyal subjects that it was ‘a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs’. The tendency of those in authority to show who’s in charge by issuing no-smoking ...

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