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Diary

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s Grotto, 5 October 2023

... Abbey statue of Shakespeare, even contributing a prologue for the benefit performance of Julius Caesar that the countess organised in 1738. When the family gave up their holdings in Barbados, however, is less clear, and the sale of their interest in Carolina is unlikely to have been an exercise in disinvestment motivated by abolitionism. The 4th ...

Writing about Shakespeare

Frank Kermode, 9 December 1999

... in obscurity. A few quotations roughly suggest the stages by which this development occurred. In Julius Caesar, one of the first Globe plays as well as a play with deep political interests, Brutus has to decide whether to join the conspiracy against Caesar. So here is a man thinking about something we take to be ...

Not for Horrid Profs

Colin Burrow: Kermode’s Shakespeare, 1 June 2000

Shakespeare's Language 
by Frank Kermode.
Allen Lane, 324 pp., £20, April 2000, 0 7139 9378 2
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... they are early and relatively unimportant (although Henry V was probably written only just before Julius Caesar). Kermode suggests that the prison scene at the end of Richard II marks a stage in the emergence of characters who think in verse, and shows ‘signs of a language formidably changing to meet greater challenges’, and that in Henry IV ...

Public Works

David Norbrook, 5 June 1986

The Faber Book of Political Verse 
edited by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 481 pp., £17.50, May 1986, 0 571 13947 7
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... many conservative texts by foregrounding, rather than eliding, the debates. Paulin concedes that Julius Caesar may reveal a ‘closet republicanism’. These two plays alone show that there was a far more sophisticated awareness of republican institutions in Renaissance England than many critics, and historians, have conceded. Ben Jonson’s Roman ...

Funny Mummy

E.S. Turner, 2 December 1982

The Penguin Stephen Leacock 
by Robertson Davies.
Penguin, 527 pp., £2.95, October 1981, 0 14 005890 7
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Jerome K. Jerome: A Critical Biography 
by Joseph Connolly.
Orbis, 208 pp., £7.95, August 1982, 0 85613 349 3
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Three Men in a Boat 
by Jerome K. Jerome, annotated and introduced by Christopher Matthew and Benny Green.
Joseph, 192 pp., £12.50, August 1982, 0 907516 08 4
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The Lost Stories of W.S. Gilbert 
edited by Peter Haining.
Robson, 255 pp., £7.95, September 1982, 0 86051 200 2
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... of effort’, there were strings of leading questions ‘something like this’: Q. Did not Julius Caesar invade Britain? A. He did. Q. Was it not in the year 55 BC? A. It was. Q. Was he later assassinated in Rome? A. He was. Q. Did not his friend Brutus take a part in assassinating him? A. He did. It sounds crazy, yet rings a ...

Nationalising English

Patrick Parrinder, 28 January 1993

The Great Betrayal: Memoirs of a Life in Education 
by Brian Cox.
Chapmans, 386 pp., £17.99, September 1992, 1 85592 605 9
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... in England and Wales would be tested on one of three Shakespeare plays – Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Later it emerged that all that most pupils will face is a test based on extracts of verse and prose in a 45-page anthology which has just been published. Meanwhile Mr Patten, who has no powers to control ...

Drain the Swamps

Steven Shapin, 4 June 2020

The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator 
by Timothy Winegard.
Text, 300 pp., £12.99, September 2019, 978 1 911231 12 7
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... certain symptomatic patterns and outcomes. Shakespeare and his audiences were familiar with agues. Julius Caesar greets one of the plotters with the assurance that he was ‘ne’re so much your enemy/As that ague which hath made you lean’, and Caliban, shaking and shivering, is thought to be ‘some monster of the isle with four legs, who hath got, as ...

Seven Centuries Too Late

Barbara Newman: Popes in Hell, 15 July 2021

Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy 
by Guy Raffa.
Harvard, 370 pp., £28.95, May 2020, 978 0 674 98083 9
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Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante 
by David Bowe.
Oxford, 225 pp., £60, November 2020, 978 0 19 884957 5
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Dante’s Christian Ethics: Purgatory and Its Moral Contexts 
by George Corbett.
Cambridge, 233 pp., £75, March 2020, 978 1 108 48941 6
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Why Dante Matters: An Intelligent Person’s Guide 
by John Took.
Bloomsbury, 207 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 4729 5103 8
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Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Literature, Doctrine, Reality 
by Zygmunt Barański.
Legenda, 658 pp., £75, February 2020, 978 1 78188 879 7
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... philosophers, the physicians Hippocrates and Galen, the Amazons Camilla and Penthesilia, Aeneas, Julius Caesar, the sultan Saladin, and others renowned for their wisdom or courage. Virgil himself, consigned to the same realm, explains that together ‘sanza speme vivemo in disio’ – ‘we live in desire without hope.’Virgil’s​ damnation has ...

Hard Eggs and Radishes

Thomas Jones: Shelley at Sea, 21 July 2022

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Vol. VII 
edited by Nora Crook.
Johns Hopkins, 931 pp., £103.50, May 2021, 978 1 4214 3783 5
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... Great), Kant, Catherine (the Great), Plato, Alexander (the Great), Aristotle, Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Constantine, ‘the Anarchs old’ – before describing ‘how and by what paths I have been brought/To this dread pass’.One spring morning, Rousseau found himself ‘asleep/Under a mountain’ beside a ‘gentle rivulet’ when a ...

A Pound a Glimpse

Daniel Smith: Epilepsy, 16 November 2017

A Smell of Burning: The Story of Epilepsy 
by Colin Grant.
Cape, 242 pp., £16.99, August 2016, 978 0 224 10182 0
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The End of Epilepsy? A History of the Modern Era of Epilepsy, 1860-2010 
by Dieter Schmidt and Simon Shorvon.
Oxford, 208 pp., £39.99, September 2016, 978 0 19 872590 9
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... like St Paul, Joan of Arc and Van Gogh, may or may not have had epilepsy, and some of whom, like Julius Caesar, Dostoevsky and Harriet Tubman, almost certainly did. He also keeps vigil over his brother, determined ‘to discover what it was that marked him with epilepsy’ – how he had been changed by the condition and what it was that made him ...

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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... detail takes the place of the speculatively personal. If 1599 – when Shakespeare wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar and As You Like It, as well as beginning Hamlet – was ‘the most decisive year of his career, one in which he redefined himself and his theatre’, that transformation could be understood only in relation to the year’s turbulent ...

Just one of those ends

Michael Wood: Apocalypse Regained, 13 December 2001

Apocalypse Now Redux 
directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
August 2001
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Marlon Brando 
by Patricia Bosworth.
Weidenfeld, 216 pp., £12.99, October 2001, 0 297 84284 6
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... to imitate almost anyone, men and women. The characters Brando portrayed in his early films, from Julius Caesar (1953), say, to One-Eyed Jacks (1961), were full of rage; and rage, as late as his autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me (1994), was at the centre of Brando’s story about himself. Rage against his father, mainly, but also a more diffuse ...

Brief Encounters

Andrew O’Hagan: Gielgud and Redgrave, 5 August 2004

Gielgud's Letters 
edited by Richard Mangan.
Weidenfeld, 564 pp., £20, March 2004, 0 297 82989 0
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Secret Dreams: A Biography of Michael Redgrave 
by Alan Strachan.
Weidenfeld, 484 pp., £25, April 2004, 0 297 60764 2
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... gloves more often than not had to fend for themselves. Gielgud was never out of work, unlike his Julius Caesar co-star the late Marlon Brando, who made a fabulous cult of his non-appearance on stage, and whose indolence and contempt for the business causes Gielgud to look like a worker bee, making regular honey at no great expense to the spirit. Brando ...

What the Badger Found

Michael Kulikowski: Moneybags, 2 February 2023

When Money Talks: A History of Coins and Numismatics 
by Frank L. Holt.
Oxford, 336 pp., £25.99, October 2021, 978 0 19 751765 9
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Coin Hoards and Hoarding in the Roman World 
edited by Jerome Mairat, Andrew Wilson and Chris Howgego.
Oxford, 368 pp., £90, May 2022, 978 0 19 886638 1
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... in the Greek tradition, though almost never as aesthetically pleasing.As the republic fractured, Julius Caesar became the first living man to see his portrait on a Roman coin; his ideological heir, Mark Antony, and his legal heir, Octavian, followed suit, as did some of their rivals. After Octavian, as Augustus, cemented ...

Ravishing

Colm Tóibín: Sex Lives of the Castrati, 8 October 2015

The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds 
by Martha Feldman.
California, 454 pp., £40, March 2015, 978 0 520 27949 0
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Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage and Music in the Life of Atto Melani 
by Roger Freitas.
Cambridge, 452 pp., £22.99, May 2014, 978 1 107 69610 5
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... roles for castrati were the alpha males Alexander the Great, Richard I, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar. Boys were castrated to make them better and stronger singers, not to make them girls. On the other hand, while living in the house of a Russian prince the castrato Balatri ‘gained unheard of access to the sexually segregated, staunchly ...

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