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When the Floods Came

James Meek: England’s Water, 31 July 2008

... although nobody knew exactly where or when. The county’s emergency command system, known as Gold Command, opened up at its base in Quedgeley, south-west of Gloucester, on Friday morning, ready for the worst. The private servants knew too: Severn Trent says it issued an ‘emergency weather warning’ to its managers on Friday. But the company had locked ...

Corncob Caesar

Murray Sayle, 6 February 1997

Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of Douglas MacArthur 
by Geoffrey Perret.
Deutsch, 663 pp., £20, October 1996, 9780233990026
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... his lawyer grandfather had emigrated to the US in 1828 from Glasgow. His father, then Captain Arthur MacArthur, already had genuine military credentials, despite his lowly rank. MacArthur Sr had enlisted in the US Army as a student during the Civil War, from which he emerged, aged 21, a full colonel. Joining the regular army, he dropped in rank to second ...

Being that can be understood is language

Richard Rorty: H.-G. Gadamer, 16 March 2000

... historiography or jurisprudence. He is joined in this appeal by philosophers of physics like Arthur Fine, who asks us to abandon the assumption that natural science ‘is special, and that scientific thinking is unlike any other’. Putnam and Fine both ridicule the idea that the discourse of physics is somehow more in touch with reality than any other ...

Robin’s Hoods

Patrick Wormald, 5 May 1983

Robin Hood 
by J.C. Holt.
Thames and Hudson, 208 pp., £8.95, May 1982, 0 500 25081 2
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The Early History of Glastonbury: An Edition, Translation and Study of William of Malmesbury’s ‘De Antiquitate Glastonie Ecclesie’ 
by John Scott.
Boydell, 224 pp., £25, January 1982, 9780851151540
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Megalithomania 
by John Michell.
Thames and Hudson, 168 pp., £8.50, March 1982, 9780500012611
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... friend. The Robin Hood cycle affords the all-time definitive image of the Crook with a Heart of Gold, which no doubt accounts for its spectacular success. The historical Robin, whoever he was, is sure to have had his darker side. To judge from the modest price of this handsomely illustrated book, its publishers envisage an audience of metaphorical alehouses ...

Possessed

A.N. Wilson, 14 May 1992

Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City 1939-1966 
by Martin Stannard.
Dent, 523 pp., £25, April 1992, 0 460 86062 3
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... of Disraeli’s father, a middle-class man of letters, when he read his son’s earlier novels; Arthur Waugh, not unlike Isaac D’Israeli, took a quizzical view of his son’s upper-class fantasies.) Brideshead Revisited (hence its appeal to the Americans) is not a picture of what the world is like: rather, a carefully painted canvas of what Waugh would ...

Frognal Days

Zachary Leader: Files on the Fifties, 4 June 1998

Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the Fifties 
by Nora Sayre.
Rutgers, 464 pp., £27.95, April 1997, 0 8135 2231 5
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... by Lissitzky, Klee and Chagall, the ancient African carvings, pre-Columbian sculptures, Asante gold weights – they would recount their experiences with the FBI, the Committee and the American legion, ‘still sorting out the accusations levelled against them, still amazed at the notion of their alleged guilt’. The guilt in question is presented as ...

The New Deal

Tom Crewe, 17 August 2017

... with past generations. Mrs May must fix it. Or next time Britain will buy the Marxists’ fool’s gold – and the Tories will be helpless to prevent the inevitable horrors that will follow.’The Sun wasn’t alone in having thrown everything at it. The Telegraph accelerated further away from its staid traditions, running a series of headlines that ...

Not Enough Delilahs

Andrew O’Hagan: Lillian Ross, 4 July 2019

Picture 
by Lillian Ross.
NYRB, 219 pp., £14.99, June 2019, 978 1 68137 315 7
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... a tough little bird out of Damon Runyon. She went at her Cobb salad like a demon. She had little gold earrings made like shirt buttons, and they glinted in tune with her eyes, which slid from side to side while these ‘European intellectuals’ talked about wine. The film director Karel Reisz was there, and his wife Betsy Blair, who had been in Hollywood at ...

Nobbled or Not

Bernard Porter: The Central African Federation, 25 May 2006

British Documents on the End of Empire Series B Vol. 9: Central Africa: Part I: Closer Association 1945-58 
by Philip Murphy.
Stationery Office, 448 pp., £150, November 2005, 0 11 290586 2
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British Documents on the End of Empire Series B Vol. 9: Central Africa: Part II: Crisis and Dissolution 1959-65 
by Philip Murphy.
Stationery Office, 602 pp., £150, November 2005, 0 11 290587 0
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... not cut much Parliamentary ice.’) There is an interesting memorandum here from 1955 by Sir Arthur Benson, the governor of Northern Rhodesia, which claims that most Africans would support Britain’s policy against the nationalists if Britain would only make their chiefs ‘divine’ again. Ian Smith took the same general line in 1965, just before the ...

Wedgism

Neal Ascherson: Cold War Stories, 23 July 2009

Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain and International Communism 1945-50 
by Marc Selverstone.
Harvard, 304 pp., £36.95, February 2009, 978 0 674 03179 1
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... Stalin and ‘secret police’ carried out mock arrests and purges. It was in this atmosphere that Arthur Schlesinger Jr published his influential book The Vital Center. He denounced extremism on both right and left and pushed his vision of a ‘liberal anti-Communism’ and a ‘non-Communist left’, but – as Selverstone points out – the book took a ...

Bonfire in Merrie England

Richard Wilson: Shakespeare’s Burning, 4 May 2017

... to celebrate its rebuilding. Brave Enterprise was written by the theatre’s publicist, Arthur Kenneth Chesterton, who had moved to Stratford in 1925, after being appointed drama critic of the Stratford Herald on the recommendation of his famous second cousin, G.K. Chesterton. Born in 1899 in South Africa, where his father supervised a ...

Strange Little Woman

Ferdinand Mount: First and Only Empress, 22 November 2018

Empress: Queen Victoria and India 
by Miles Taylor.
Yale, 388 pp., £25, August 2018, 978 0 300 11809 4
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Eastern Encounters: Four Centuries of Paintings and Manuscripts from the Indian Subcontinent 
by Emily Hannam.
Royal Collections Trust, 256 pp., £45, June 2018, 978 1 909741 45 4
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Splendours of the Subcontinent: A Prince’s Tour of India 1875-76 
by Kajal Meghani.
Royal Collections Trust, 216 pp., £29.95, March 2017, 978 1 909741 42 3
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... Not surprisingly, many servants of the Raj found her views tiresome in the extreme. In 1897, Arthur Godley, later Lord Kilbracken, who was under-secretary for India for 26 years, counselled his boss against republishing the 1858 proclamation to mark the Diamond Jubilee: ‘This is hardly the moment to remind the world that the queen promised to make no ...

Mushroom Cameo

Rosemary Hill: Noël Coward’s Third Act, 29 June 2023

Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 634 pp., £30, March 2023, 978 1 4746 1280 7
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... musical talent, which came from his grandfather, a resident organist at the Crystal Palace, via Arthur Coward’s less distinguished career demonstrating harmoniums for the piano makers Metzler & Co. Violet, whose family had greater pretensions to social status than her husband’s but with fewer means to maintain them, was also musical as well as witty and ...

See stars, Mummy

Rosemary Hill: Barbara Comyns’s Childhood, 9 May 2024

Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence 
by Avril Horner.
Manchester, 347 pp., £30, March, 978 1 5261 7374 4
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... she does not always appear an attractive character. After Pemberton left her, she took up with Arthur Price, a small-time criminal and con man, helping him in his second-hand car business. She became ‘a part of that world’ and was amused by chatting in the pub to a couple of his friends ‘who specialised in robbing post offices and had it down to a ...

A Walnut in Sacrifice

Nick Richardson: How to Cast a Spell, 7 November 2024

The Grimoire Encyclopedia: Volume 1 
by David Rankine.
Hadean Press, 739 pp., £39.99, April 2023, 978 1 914166 36 5
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The Grimoire Encyclopedia: Volume 2 
by David Rankine.
Hadean Press, 660 pp., £39.99, April 2023, 978 1 914166 37 2
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Art of the Grimoire 
by Owen Davies.
Yale, 256 pp., £25, October 2023, 978 0 300 27201 7
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... put these spirits to work for unvirtuous ends: ‘To Make a Girl Dance in the Nude’, ‘To Have Gold Pieces, as Many and as Often and Every Time You Want’, and so on.What kinds of creature these spirits are and whether they can be considered good or evil is a controversial matter. In an essay included in his edition of the True Grimoire (2010), Jake ...

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