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Virtuosa

Caroline Campbell: Sofonisba Anguissola, 10 September 2020

A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana 
edited by Leticia Ruiz Gómez.
Museo Nacional del Prado, 255 pp., £25, January, 978 84 8480 537 3
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Sofonisba’s Lesson: A Renaissance Artist and Her Work 
by Michael Cole.
Princeton, 312 pp., £50, February, 978 0 691 19832 3
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... held at the Prado, curated by Leticia Ruiz Gómez, and a monograph by the American art historian Michael Cole.Around 1535, a girl was born in the city of Cremona, fifty miles south-east of Milan, to Amilcare Anguissola and his second wife, Bianca Ponzone. Amilcare was a member of the minor nobility and Bianca the daughter of a local count. The ...

Taste, Tact and Racism

Ian Hamilton: The death of Princess Diana, 22 January 1998

Assassination of a Princess 
by Ahmad Ata.
Dar Al-Huda, 75 pp., £5, September 1997, 977 5340 23 3
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Diana: A Princess Killed by Love 
by Ilham Sharshar.
Privately published, 125 pp., £10, September 1998, 977 5190 95 9
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Who Killed Diana? 
by Muhammad Ragab.
Privately published, 127 pp., £5, September 1998, 977 08 0675 7
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Harrods: A Place in Knightsbridge 
by Tim Dale.
Harrods, 224 pp., £35, November 1995, 1 900055 01 5
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... to put his own spin on the tragedy – and, indeed, on the romance. Within days of the car crash, Michael Cole – al-Fayed’s ultra-Brit PR man – was feeding the newspapers sugary tidbits from the couple’s final hours. Diana, he said, had given Dodi a pair of cufflinks that had once belonged to her father. Dodi had responded with a ‘Tell me ...

Nanny knows best

Michael Stewart, 4 June 1987

Kinnock 
by Michael Leapman.
Unwin Hyman, 217 pp., £11.95, May 1987, 0 04 440006 3
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The Thatcher Years: A Decade of Revolution in British Politics 
by John Cole.
BBC, 216 pp., £12.95, April 1987, 0 563 20572 5
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Thatcherism and British Politics: The End of Consensus? 
by Dennis Kavanagh.
Oxford, 334 pp., £22.50, March 1987, 0 19 827522 6
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The New Right: The Counter-Revolution in Political, Social and Economic Thought 
by David Green.
Wheatsheaf, 238 pp., £22.50, March 1987, 0 7450 0127 0
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... man in a position made impossible by historical developments, one will not find much in either Michael Leapman’s sympathetic and readable portrait, or John Cole’s lively and good-humoured canter over the events of the last decade, to change one’s mind. The nature of the Labour Party’s – and Kinnock’s ...

Bon-hommy

Michael Wood: Émigré Words, 1 April 2021

Émigrés: French Words that Turned English 
by Richard Scholar.
Princeton, 253 pp., £25, September 2020, 978 0 691 19032 7
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... There are​ some wonderful rhymes in Cole Porter’s song ‘I get a kick out of you’: if-whiff-terrif, high-guy-sky with the first syllable of i-dea. And, even better:When I’m out on a quiet spreeFighting vainly the old ennuiAnd I suddenly turn and seeYour fabulous face.We wonder why ‘fighting vainly’ is subtly better than ‘vainly fighting’, we are pleasurably uncertain what ‘a quiet spree’ might look like, and ‘the old ennui’ impeccably captures a rather boastful world-weariness also known as the ‘mal du siècle’, whatever century you have in mind ...

Vagueness

Hans Keller, 1 May 1980

Michael Tippett: An Introductory Study 
by David Matthews.
Faber, 112 pp., £5.95, December 1979, 0 571 10954 3
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Tippett and his Operas 
by Eric Walter White.
Barrie and Jenkins, 142 pp., £7.97, January 1980, 0 214 20573 8
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... confusion invariably inspires confusion. C.G. Jung, a mind of confused genius, was a hell-send for Michael Tippett, a veritable genius of confusion – who now, celebrating the 75th year of his consistently lively life, inspires sundry confusions in his commentators, and even in those who comment on his commentators: ‘...

Multinational Soap

Emily Witt: Teju Cole’s ‘Tremor’, 2 November 2023

Tremor 
by Teju Cole.
Faber, 239 pp., £18.99, October, 978 0 571 28335 4
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... In the first paragraph​ of Teju Cole’s new novel, Tremor, a man takes a photo of a hedge. ‘The leaves are glossy and dark and from the dying blooms rises a fragrance that might be jasmine.’ Probably not jasmine, since the main character, a photography professor called Tunde, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but frost zones are not the point ...

A Big Life

Michael Hofmann: Seamus Heaney, 4 June 2015

New Selected Poems 1988-2013 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 222 pp., £18.99, November 2014, 978 0 571 32171 1
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... wonderful moment near the beginning of his Paris Review interview (beautifully conducted by Henri Cole) where Cole asks him, ‘What about the Heaneys? Were they democrats?’ to which Heaney makes the magnificent reply: ‘The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behaviour that was ...

It’s slippery in here

Christopher Tayler: ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’, 21 September 2017

Twin Peaks: The Return 
created by Mark Frost and David Lynch.
Showtime/Sky Atlantic, 18 episodes, 21 May 2017 to 3 September 2017
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... Mueller might be on people’s minds, but on Twin Peaks the salient FBI boss is still Gordon Cole, a hearing-impaired, gee-whizzily cryptic character played by Lynch himself. We first caught up with him in a conference room, where a subordinate showed him a sequence of bizarre and scary images, and Lynch squawked, a bit ingenuously: ‘What the ...

Presence of Mind

Michael Wood: Barthes, 19 November 2009

Carnets du voyage en Chine 
by Roland Barthes.
Christian Bourgois, 252 pp., €23, February 2009, 978 2 267 02019 9
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Journal de deuil 
by Roland Barthes.
Seuil/Imec, 271 pp., €18.90, February 2009, 978 2 02 098951 0
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... forget anything. But then what we hang on to becomes all the more remarkable, and Barthes, like Cole Porter, was the author of phrases and rhythms that for some of us will not go away until we do. ‘To write,’ Barthes suggested in Criticism and Truth (1966), ‘is to engage in a difficult relationship with our own language.’ This is not exactly ...

Was he? Had he?

Corey Robin: In the Name of Security, 19 October 2006

The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government 
by David Johnson.
Chicago, 277 pp., £13, May 2006, 0 226 40190 1
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Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security 
by David Cole and James Dempsey.
New Press, 320 pp., £10.99, March 2006, 1 56584 939 6
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General Ashcroft: Attorney at War 
by Nancy Baker.
Kansas, 320 pp., £26.50, April 2006, 0 7006 1455 9
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State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration 
by James Risen.
Free Press, 240 pp., £18.99, January 2006, 0 7432 7578 0
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Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush 
by Eric Boehlert.
Free Press, 352 pp., $25, May 2006, 0 7432 8931 5
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... information. The ‘obstacles to information sharing were more bureaucratic than legal’, David Cole and James Dempsey write in Terrorism and the Constitution, and had little to do ‘with the constitutional principles of due process, accountability, or checks and balances’. But while the government rides roughshod over constitutional principles, it has ...

Richly-Wristed

Ian Aitken, 13 May 1993

Changing Faces: The History of the ‘Guardian’, 1956-88 
by Geoffrey Taylor.
Fourth Estate, 352 pp., £20, March 1993, 1 85702 100 2
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... journalists on other newspapers. Part of the story he has to tell is how people like John Cole – yes, the same John Cole – and his successor as News Editor. Jean Stead, dragged the paper more or less reluctantly into mainstream, news-oriented journalism. Coming from what at the time was probably the most ...
Pluralism and the Personality of the State 
by David Runciman.
Cambridge, 279 pp., £35, June 1997, 0 521 55191 9
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... convention, Sir Henry Maine’s status and contract, Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Michael Oakeshott’s ‘Societas’ and ‘Universitas’, Durkheim’s ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ solidarity, and Hobbesian vertical ‘command’ models of authority v. Lockean theories of popular ‘consent’. Bertrand Russell described his ...

Up the Garden Path

R.W. Johnson: Michael Foot, 26 April 2007

Michael Foot: A Life 
by Kenneth O. Morgan.
Harper, 568 pp., £25, March 2007, 978 0 00 717826 1
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... One day in 1993, I found myself on a bus in Oxford with Michael Foot. He looked shambolic even by my standards – donkey jacket, stick, long hair all over the place. But nobody minded. You don’t often see leading politicians on a bus and passenger after passenger came up to say hello. He smiled and was the soul of friendliness ...

A Family of Acrobats

Adam Mars-Jones: Teju Cole, 3 July 2014

Every Day Is for the Thief 
by Teju Cole.
Faber, 162 pp., £12.99, April 2014, 978 0 571 30792 0
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... It’s​ not entirely clear which of Teju Cole’s books, Open City or Every Day Is for the Thief, has seniority. Open City made a strong impression when it appeared in 2011, and now Every Day Is for the Thief has arrived in consolidation, though it first appeared in Nigeria in 2007. Neither book offers much of the structure or imaginative texture of fiction, with Open City resembling a beautifully composed and extended blog, while Every Day Is for the Thief starts off journalistically, as if its subject (as the title suggests) is going to be Nigerian corruption, as experienced by an American resident visiting his native country after a long absence ...

Having it both ways

Peter Clarke, 27 January 1994

A.J.P. Taylor: A Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 468 pp., £18.99, January 1994, 1 85619 210 5
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A.J.P. Taylor: The Traitor within the Gates 
by Robert Cole.
Macmillan, 285 pp., £40, November 1993, 0 333 59273 5
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From Napoleon to the Second International: International Essays on the 19th Century 
by A.J.P. Taylor, edited by Chris Wrigley.
Hamish Hamilton, 426 pp., £25, November 1993, 0 241 13444 7
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... is not usually taken in, least of all by unsubstantiated assertions from Taylor himself. Robert Cole’s book, The Traitor within the Gates, forms an instructive contrast. In his treatment of several episodes, Cole has placed his reliance on the authority of the autobiography. For example, he simply reiterates its ...

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