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It’s great to change your mind

Christopher Ricks, 7 February 1985

Using Biography 
by William Empson.
Chatto, 259 pp., £12.95, September 1984, 0 7011 2889 5
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Seven Types of Ambiguity 
by William Empson.
Hogarth, 258 pp., £4.95, September 1984, 0 7012 0556 3
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Collected Poems 
by William Empson.
Hogarth, 119 pp., £3.95, September 1984, 0 7012 0555 5
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... really did believe in God, they accepted the ample evidence that he was like a capricious earthly king.’ This has unexpected reserves of pity and respect – unexpected, that is, in anyone other than Empson. The ones whom he does not respect are the latterday saints, the sanctimonious distorters and narrowers of the great writers. Again and again his ...

Playing with terror

Christopher Ricks, 21 January 1982

The Comfort of Strangers 
by Ian McEwan.
Cape, 134 pp., £5.95, October 1981, 0 224 01931 7
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... didn’t exactly plan to come, but it wasn’t completely accidental either.’ Did King Lear invite exactly his exacted fate? Did he ask for it? Do Colin and Mary? The Venetian police have their unprepossessing prepossessions. While they clearly did not believe she had committed any crime, she was treated as though tainted by what the ...

John and Henry

Christopher Reid, 2 December 1982

The Life of John Berryman 
by John Haffenden.
Routledge, 451 pp., £15, September 1982, 0 7100 9216 4
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Poets in their Youth: A Memoir 
by Eileen Simpson.
Faber, 272 pp., £10.95, September 1982, 0 571 11925 5
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... and by his constant procrastination when it came to working on projects – an edition of King Lear, a life of Stephen Crane – that might have provided the basis for financial security. Nonetheless, Simpson looks back on them with clear sight and affection. Her marriage to Berryman was wrecked by his unsteadiness and egotism, drinking and ...

Bristling with Barricades

Christopher Clark: Paris, 1848, 3 November 2022

Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848 
by Jonathan Beecher.
Cambridge, 474 pp., £29.99, April 2021, 978 1 108 84253 2
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... tumult was especially consequential. At the end of February, after bitter fighting in the streets, King Louis Philippe, the beneficiary of the July Revolution of 1830, fled Paris. The resulting power vacuum was filled by a provisional government assembled in great haste from a list drawn up by newspaper editors and acclaimed by delirious crowds. A new ...

Hourglass or Penny-Farthing?

Christopher Tayler: Damon Galgut, 31 July 2014

Arctic Summer 
by Damon Galgut.
Atlantic, 357 pp., £17.99, May 2014, 978 0 85789 718 3
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... two-volume Life and the biographies by Wendy Moffat, Nicola Beauman and Francis King.) As such, it joins distinguished portraits of Novalis (Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower), Dostoevsky (Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg) and Henry James (Colm Tóibín, The Master), plus recentish likenesses of ...

w00t

Christopher Tayler: The Fabulous Elif Batuman, 17 February 2011

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them 
by Elif Batuman.
Granta, 296 pp., £16.99, April 2011, 978 1 84708 313 5
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... nuggets of research: did you know that Babel once interrogated one of the future directors of King Kong? There are lots of funny quotations – ‘“Tolstoy has learned to ride a bicycle,” Chertkov noted … “Is this not inconsistent with Christian ideals?”’ – and bursts of fantastic, too good to be true dialogue. At the same time, she gets ...

Predicamental

Christopher Clark: Gravelotte, 1870, 21 September 2023

Bismarck’s War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe 
by Rachel Chrastil.
Allen Lane, 485 pp., £30, June, 978 0 241 41919 9
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... the Third Republic. On 18 January 1871 – the anniversary of the coronation of the first Prussian king in 1701 – an extraordinary ceremony took place in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Surrounded by his fellow German monarchs and cheered by generals and officers of the German contingents, Wilhelm I of Prussia proclaimed a German Empire and was himself ...

Genetic Mountaineering

Adrian Woolfson: The evolution of evolvability, 6 February 2003

A New Kind of Science 
by Stephen Wolfram.
Wolfram Media, 1197 pp., £40, May 2002, 1 57955 008 8
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... One of the most intriguing of all magic tricks, the Disappearing Handkerchiefs, was presented to King Louis-Philippe at the Château St-Cloud in 1846 by the renowned French magician Robert-Houdin. An account can be found in his Memoirs: I borrowed from my noble spectators several handkerchiefs which I made into a parcel and laid on the table ...

On the imagining of conspiracy

Christopher Hitchens, 7 November 1991

Harlot’s Ghost 
by Norman Mailer.
Joseph, 1122 pp., £15.99, October 1991, 0 7181 2934 2
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A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs 
by Theodore Draper.
Hill and Wang, 690 pp., $27.95, June 1991, 0 8090 9613 7
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... for the ends of power. He caused blackmail letters to be sent from the FBI to Dr Martin Luther King, urging him to commit suicide.Historians and journalists have never quite known what to do about these sorts of disclosure. They have never known whether to treat such episodes as normal or exceptional. It is, for example, perfectly true to say that the ...

Impossible Desires

Adam Smyth: Death of the Book, 7 March 2024

Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book 
by Brian Cummings.
Oxford, 562 pp., £37.99, February 2022, 978 0 19 284731 7
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... of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem that is even older, about the adventures of the historical king of Uruk, who ruled in the 27th century BCE. The indentations on the tablet report that the gods sent a flood to destroy mankind, and that one of the gods, Ea, warned Utnapishtim, king of Shuruppak in southern Iraq, who ...
The Provisional IRA 
by Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie.
Heinemann, 374 pp., £12.95, June 1987, 0 434 07410 1
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Ten Men Dead 
by David Beresford.
Grafton, 432 pp., £3.50, May 1987, 0 586 06533 4
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... months since the late Seventies, when they killed Lord Mountbatten and 18 soldiers on one day. Tom King, the Northern Ireland Secretary, said that 500 new members of the RUC would be recruited, but he didn’t mention bringing in fresh troops. It is clear now that the SAS and possibly other undercover units were staking out police stations in anticipation of ...

Fenmen

Ronald Hutton, 5 August 1982

Fenland Riots and the English Revolution 
by Keith Lindley.
Heinemann, 259 pp., £16.50, March 1982, 0 435 32535 3
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Commonwealth to Protectorate 
by Austin Woolrych.
Oxford, 433 pp., £22.50, March 1982, 0 19 822659 4
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... such ‘apolitical’ writers as Camden. During the 1630s the promoters of the works included the King and courtiers, but also a local entrepreneur, Sir John Monson, while the largest scheme of all was undertaken by the Earl of Bedford, one of the leaders of the political group self-consciously opposed to other royal policies. Thus the tension appears to have ...

‘A Naughty House’

Charles Nicholl: Shakespeare’s Landlord, 24 June 2010

... one fact which makes the case worth pursuing is the involvement of Shakespeare’s former landlord Christopher Mountjoy. There is an obvious link: like the three goldworkers, Mountjoy was French. Also like them, he lived in the Cripplegate area (though his house was within the London city walls, on respectable Silver Street, whereas the alleged fornicators ...

Sweaney Peregraine

Paul Muldoon, 1 November 1984

Station Island 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 123 pp., £5.95, October 1984, 0 571 13301 0
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Sweeney Astray: A Version 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 85 pp., £6.95, October 1984, 0 571 13360 6
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Rich 
by Craig Raine.
Faber, 109 pp., £5.95, September 1984, 0 571 13215 4
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... however, Heaney rather ‘expectedly’ throws his voice through the figure of Sweeney, the Ulster king who’s cursed by Saint Ronan and is transformed into a bird-man. In a note to Station Island Heaney writes: ‘A version of the Irish tale is available in my Sweeney Astray, but I trust these glosses can survive without the support system of the original ...

Fuss, Fatigue and Rage

Ian Gilmour: Two Duff Kings, 15 July 1999

George IV 
by E.A. Smith.
Yale, 306 pp., £25, May 1999, 0 300 07685 1
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... The 20th century has seen several biographies of the last of the four, much the best of which is Christopher Hibbert’s two-volume study published nearly thirty years ago. The late E.A. Smith, who sadly died between the writing and the publication of this biography, thought that all previous studies were ‘to some degree superficial, and most follow the ...

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