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Ready to Rumble

John Upton, 16 March 2000

King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero 
by David Remnick.
Picador, 326 pp., £14.99, October 1999, 0 330 37188 6
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Muhammad Ali: Ringside 
edited by John Miller and Aaron Kenedi.
Virgin, 128 pp., £14.99, September 1999, 1 85227 852 8
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... nation has been – superficially at least – far more harmonious. From Our ’Enry through Gary Mason and Big Frank Bruno (but not Joe Bugner, who was Hungarian, refused to play the game and was disliked by all on both counts) the cult of the deferential, smiling bruiser still holds sway. We expect our fighters to behave like Sergeant Paine in The Third Man ...

Poor George

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 7 March 1991

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power 
by Daniel Yergin.
Simon and Schuster, 877 pp., £20, January 1991, 0 671 50248 4
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... On 3 April 1986, at his filling-station in north Dallas, Billy Jack Mason was protesting about the fall in the price of oil. Cars came from as far as Waco, and by breakfast, the queue was six miles long. He was offering unleaded at zero cents a gallon. Reporters sought Billy’s opinion on the future. ‘That’s overseas ...

Sleeves Full of Raisins

Tom Johnson: Mobs of Wreckers, 13 April 2023

Shipwrecks and the Bounty of the Sea 
by David Cressy.
Oxford, 313 pp., £30, September 2022, 978 0 19 286339 3
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... horses and carts and repurposed ploughs. People took whatever they could find. Francis Saveer, a mason, boarded the ship and managed to extract a piece of silk, eighteen rows of buttons, a jacket and a waistcoat. His servant took ‘two old jerkins and some old shirts’, which Saveer’s wife ‘threw away so soon as they were brought home’. Little Will ...

Daddy, ain’t you heard?

Mark Ford: Langston Hughes’s Journeys, 16 November 2023

Let America Be America Again: Conversations with Langston Hughes 
edited by Christopher C. De Santis.
Oxford, 339 pp., £32, August 2022, 978 0 19 285504 6
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... Mary Patterson, married Lewis Sheridan Leary in 1858. The following year, Leary was recruited by John Brown for his suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry, and the bullet-riddled shawl that was eventually returned to Mary was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next ...

A Subtle Form of Hypocrisy

John Bayley, 2 October 1997

Playing the Game: A Biography of Sir Henry Newbolt 
by Susan Chitty.
Quartet, 288 pp., £25, July 1997, 0 7043 7107 3
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... to play and the last man in. And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,    Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame, But his captain’s hand on his shoulder smote –    ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’ The sand of the desert is sodden red –    Red with the wreck of a square that broke – The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel ...

He fights with flashing weapons

Katherine Rundell: Thomas Wyatt, 6 December 2012

Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest 
by Susan Brigden.
Faber, 714 pp., £30, September 2012, 978 0 571 23584 1
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Graven with Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt: Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy 
by Nicola Shulman.
Short Books, 378 pp., £20, April 2011, 978 1 906021 11 5
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... wit nor Wyatt himself can change the mind of Henry VIII. ‘My head sticks’: that is both a hope and a horror, in that botched beheadings were not uncommon. Thomas Cromwell’s was particularly crude and butcherly. The Tower of London has been partially reconstructed since that day in 1536, and we cannot be sure if Wyatt literally saw Anne’s beheading ...

A Little Pickle for the Husband

Michael Mason, 1 April 1999

Beeton's Book of Household Management 
by Isabella Beeton.
Southover, 1112 pp., £29.95, November 1998, 9781870962155
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... of a short story is smitten by its charms: ‘it’s so cheap that anyone can buy it, and so I hope a great number of servants, as well as mistresses, will.’ But the Beeton publicity machine also latched onto a story in the Athenaeum (which it thereafter quoted on the book’s title-page) telling of a cook who was lent a copy by her mistress, and who ...

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... Man Out, which was released in 1947. Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey ...

A Mere Piece of Furniture

Dinah Birch: Jacqueline Rose’s take on Proust, 7 February 2002

Albertine 
by Jacqueline Rose.
Chatto, 205 pp., £14.99, October 2001, 0 7011 6976 1
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... and Guildenstern Are Dead enacts a bleaker Shakespearean inheritance. No touch of immortality or hope of salvation for these helpless courtiers. This is a drama preoccupied with its own fixed conclusion: ‘In our experience, most things end with death,’ Stoppard’s Player King remarks. But Stoppard, like Browning, allows himself to side with the ...

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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... ethics and politics, appraising his magisterial synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian thought. John Took asks ‘why Dante matters’ and responds by casting him as an existentialist philosopher. And in a retrospective collection of nineteen essays, Zygmunt Barański addresses the state of Dante studies today, reflecting on everything from his treatment of ...

Fit only to be a greengrocer

E.S. Turner, 23 September 1993

Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire 
by Tom Pocock.
Weidenfeld, 264 pp., £20, August 1993, 0 297 81308 0
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... to go out to North America to report on the labour colonies set up by the Salvation Army in the hope of making men out of Britain’s derelicts, and to consider whether this was an idea on which the Government could build. General Booth’s Army was but one of many such organisations. The worst of them specialised in the arbitrary shipping abroad of ...

Hogged

E.S. Turner, 22 January 1998

Shipwrecks of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Eras 
by Terence Grocott.
Chatham, 430 pp., £30, November 1997, 1 86176 030 2
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... many frantic images recur: women, with babies, lashed to the mainmast; crewmen racing aloft in the hope that, when the ship settles, the mast-top will still be above the waves; the pitching overboard of cargo and cannon to lighten ship and the jettisoning of masts; the battening down of hatches, causing panic and asphyxiation below; the frenzied toiling at the ...

I gotta use words

Mark Ford: Eliot speaks in tongues, 11 August 2016

The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume I: Collected & Uncollected Poems 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.
Faber, 1311 pp., £40, November 2015, 978 0 571 23870 5
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The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume II: Practical Cats & Further Verses 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.
Faber, 667 pp., £40, November 2015, 978 0 571 23371 7
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... 2 of ‘Prufrock’) and Thomas Hardy’s ‘forms there flung/Against the sky’ (‘The Abbey Mason’); between ‘certain half-deserted streets’ (line 4 of ‘Prufrock’) and ‘he sought out a certain street and number’ in Chapter 20 of Little Dorrit; or, moving beyond literature, between that phrase and the recording of a payment made to ...

Into Apathy

Neil McKendrick, 21 August 1980

The Wedgwood Circle, 1730-1897 
by Barbara Wedgwood and Hensleigh Wedgwood.
Studio Vista, 386 pp., £9.95, May 1980, 0 289 70892 3
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... a continuing record of high individual success: Tom, the pioneer in the discovery of photography; John the founder of the Royal Horticultural Society; and Josiah II, the head of a great family firm secure in the knowledge of its acknowledged fame and industrial leadership. All of these claimed achievements have something of a hollow ring when examined more ...

My Castaway This Week

Miranda Carter: Desert Island Dreams, 9 June 2022

... of Desert Island Discs’ ten best episodes. Many included Yoko Ono on being hated and witnessing John Lennon’s murder, the actor Stephen Graham on his suicide attempt, Maya Angelou on childhood trauma, Simon Cowell boasting, Alfred Wainwright on his last walk in the Lakes as his eyes failed (‘the mountains wept for me that day’) and Tom Hanks moved to ...

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