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Signs of spring

Anthony Grafton, 10 June 1993

The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent 
by Charles Dempsey.
Princeton, 173 pp., £35, December 1992, 0 691 03207 6
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... interpretation remains attractive – especially when one remembers that the calendar provided the frame for a remarkable set of frescoes of the late 1460s, which combined the modern and the mythological, the erudite and the courtly, in ways that look forward to Boccaccio: the decorations of the Salone dei Mesi in the Palazzo Schifanoia in ...

Christian v. Cannibal

Michael Rogin: Norman Mailer and American history, 1 April 1999

The American Century 
by Harold Evans.
Cape, 710 pp., £40, November 1998, 0 224 05217 9
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The Time of Our Time 
by Norman Mailer.
Little, Brown, 1286 pp., £25, September 1998, 0 316 64571 0
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... history of racial extermination. To demonstrate its continuing role in US politics, Evans cites Ronald Reagan’s decision to begin his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s personal and ...

Little Brits

Tom Shippey: Murder on Hadrian’s Wall, 19 November 2015

The Real Lives of Roman Britain 
by Guy de la Bédoyère.
Yale, 241 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 300 20719 4
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... the workshop it was too big and didn’t fit. The mosaicists bodged it by taking chunks out of the frame and panel. One imagines there was a fine old row between client and contractor. Shoddy work becomes more common as the book goes on, as do other signs of what de la Bédoyère calls ‘death, disruption and decline’. Murder victims keep being unearthed: a ...

On the Move

Stephen Sedley: Constitutional Moments, 8 October 2009

The New British Constitution 
by Vernon Bogdanor.
Hart, 319 pp., £45, June 2009, 978 1 84113 671 4
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... happens into a written constitution. Utopian or dystopian? It’s not simply that freezing the frame at an arbitrary point of time is a recipe for constitutional paralysis. It’s that, if change is in truth destined to go in the direction Bogdanor predicts, democracy will not necessarily be any richer or the way we are governed any better. Anybody with ...

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 a $10 million backhander to the Contras and then lost the money in a Swiss computer error. Ronald Reagan sent three envoys with a cake and a Bible to Tehran to discuss an arms-for-hostages trade with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert MacNamara went to a briefing on Cuba believing that it was more than likely that he would not live through the weekend. The ...

These Staggering Questions

Clive James, 3 April 1980

Critical Understanding 
by Wayne Booth.
Chicago, 400 pp., £14, September 1979, 0 226 06554 5
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... various critical ‘modes’. Three versions of pluralism are examined, belonging respectively to Ronald S. Crane, Kenneth Burke and M.H. Abrams. Professor Booth does his best, at terrific length, to reconcile these three different pluralisms with each other, but finally they don’t seem able to settle down together except within the even bigger and better ...

Not Making it

Stephen Fender, 24 October 1991

The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and how it changed America 
by Nicholas Lemann.
Macmillan, 410 pp., £20, August 1991, 0 333 56584 3
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... Republican doctrine and get the Federal Government out of local problems. After all, as Ronald Reagan never tired of repeating, ‘in the Sixties we fought a war against poverty, and poverty won.’ Did Washington’s intervention actually exacerbate the problems of the inner cities, as American conservatives have always claimed, or did it simply ...

Katrina Time

Greg Grandin: Dave Eggers in New Orleans, 6 January 2011

Zeitoun 
by Dave Eggers.
Penguin, 368 pp., £8.99, 0 14 104681 3
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... being ‘under fire’. Among those gunned down was a severely mentally disabled man called Ronald Madison: police shot the unarmed African-American in the back, kicking him as he died. The police also killed 17-year-old James Brissette and wounded four of his companions as they crossed a bridge looking for food. They too were black and were not ...

The History Boy

Alan Bennett: Exam-taking, 3 June 2004

... the play, on Sunday morning I went to communion in the college chapel and in the same self-serving frame of mind, though in those days I would go to communion every Sunday anyway and sometimes mid-week too. Asked in the interview what I was intending to do with my life I probably said I planned to take holy orders. This was true, though I’m glad none of the ...

Brave as hell

John Kerrigan, 21 June 1984

Enderby’s Dark Lady, or No End to Enderby 
by Anthony Burgess.
Hutchinson, 160 pp., £7.95, March 1984, 0 09 156050 0
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Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Modern Edition 
edited by A.L. Rowse.
Macmillan, 311 pp., £20, March 1984, 0 333 36386 8
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... was at least abashed when his nakedness was pointed out: Dr Rowse seems shameless. ‘To/President Ronald Reagan’, his book begins, ‘for his professional appreciation/of/William Shakespeare’. (Was Reagan wise to garnish Rowse’s text? What if the Dark Lady becomes an election issue, with Emilia v. Ms Elgar, the Italian against the black ...

Having it both Ways

Adam Phillips, 5 November 1992

Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety 
by Marjorie Garber.
Routledge, 443 pp., £25, May 1992, 0 415 90072 7
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... for women who don’t cross-dress because they are full of good tips – ‘If you have a large frame, avoid frills and busy prints’, and so on (and off). The How-to Guide becomes the best form of social critique; these magazines reveal ‘the degree to which ALL women cross-dress as women when they produce themselves as artifacts’ (this echoes Gloria ...

Extra-Legal

Stephen Sedley, 19 October 1995

Overcoming Law 
by Richard Posner.
Harvard, 597 pp., £29.95, March 1995, 0 674 64925 7
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... understood, has no truth value – can be productive of knowledge by altering an inquirer’s frame of reference.’ This is good; it might well afford a tenable defence of his use of economics; but to concede that economic theory is at best, and in places, an illuminating metaphor for law will not sit with Posner’s idealisation of economics or allow ...

The Whale Inside

Malcolm Bull: How to be a community, 1 January 2009

Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy 
by Roberto Esposito, translated by Timothy Campbell.
Minnesota, 230 pp., £14, April 2008, 978 0 8166 4990 7
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... it is sufficient to have made a covenant; for Harrington, it is necessary for citizens actively to frame the laws themselves. The point on which Hobbes and Harrington agree is that no man enjoys immunity without being part of the sovereign body. This idea is still enshrined in the conventions regarding various forms of legal immunity, notably parliamentary ...

Hopi Mean Time

Iain Sinclair: Jim Sallis, 18 March 1999

Eye of the Cricket 
by James Sallis.
No Exit, 190 pp., £6.99, April 1998, 1 874061 77 7
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... on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal millionaires from ...

Always the Bridesmaid

Terry Castle: Sappho, 30 September 1999

Victorian Sappho 
by Yopie Prins.
Princeton, 278 pp., £40, May 1999, 0 691 05918 7
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... at once detailed, puerile and unbending – a strange hodge-podge of Baudelaire, Mary Barnard and Ronald Firbank, all coloured still by the prejudicial fancies of a flannel-shirted, late Seventies lesbian adolescence: SAPPHO: short, dark in appearance, teensiest hint of a moustache – a cross between Mme Moller (high school French teacher) and a slightly ...

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