Search Results

“... Malaria has accompanied mankind on the slog through six millennia of ‘civilisation’. Hippocrates wrote about it in Ancient Greece; Alexander the Great is usually thought to have died from it (though some opt for assassination by poison) as are the Roman emperors Vespasian, Titus and Hadrian; Dea Febris, the goddess of fever, was worshipped in Rome: indeed, some historians have identified malaria as a major factor in Rome’s decline and fall ...”

“... adoptive country, and in Abyssinia, where he made his name as a reporter – two episodes which Frank McLynn, surprisingly in a much fuller work, skips over. McLynn offers both a scholarly and a critical justification for his two volumes: ‘Neither Richard Hall’s Stanley (1974) nor ...”

“... Darwin to Nietzsche – Marcus was an intellectual hero. Even Bill Clinton claimed (according to Frank McLynn in his new biography) ‘to have read and reread’ the Meditations during his presidency. For most people now, Marcus Aurelius is remembered as the elderly emperor smothered by young Commodus on campaign on the German frontier at the start of ...”

“... outcome of 1990; the boobies are probably such as will never learn. To useful books on the subject Frank McLynn now adds an admiring but judiciously objective biography of the British soldier who came to play a leading role in this British reinforcement of the Partisans. The general story that he has to tell is very well done, and follows the archival ...”

“... A visit to creole Sierra Leone in 1861 provoked frenzies of racist nonsense. His new biographer, Frank McLynn, says that ‘Burton regarded the Sierra Leone black intellectual’s refusal to admit his own biological inferiority as in itself evidence of his mental crassness – “as if there could be brotherhood between crown and clown”.’ Burton’s ...”

“... firmly in the tradition of the works produced by the Victorian explorers who are the subject of Frank McLynn’s informative study. Such men as McLynn describes went to Africa to assert their ability to see. For the Victorians, this meant integrating the natural phenomena they travelled so far and so arduously to ...”

“... come in at once if things had clearly been going well. A latecomer to this commemorative year is Frank McLynn’s biography a thorough study supported by the full range of sources. McLynn may seem to some over-inclined to use the dogmas of psychology to explore the Prince’s fragile personality, but his emphasis on ...”

“... remedied: see below). One otherwise favourable review which I hadn’t previously seen, by Frank McLynn in the Literary Review, contains a weird aside in which I am taken to task because I, a ‘contemporary Croesus’, presume to encourage young persons contemplating a career as ‘underpaid, sneered at and generally put upon’ as academic ...”

“... exquisite art, he cannot fight the will of his wife or reverse the destruction she wreaks. Frank Kermode saw the tale as allegorical, ‘the life of art versus the life of evangelical conscience ending in the sacrifice of life’.James had heard from Edmund Gosse about the unsatisfactory marriage of John Addington Symonds, about Symonds’s ‘extreme ...”