Disease, Decay, Death

Posted on by David Gelber

Towards the end of Peter Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London, he says; ‘This is not a true story but certain things follow from other things.’ It is a good description of his latest novel, Hawksmoor, which is again concerned with an imaginative examination of the nature of cause and effect across time. […]

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Identity Checks

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

A history of the idea of the mind might seem a curious project. We tend to assume that all human beings see themselves as creatures possessed of some kind of controlling intelligence that directs their behaviour. But it is far from clear that this has always been how human beings have thought of themselves. When the […]

Power Lines

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

I should advise readers at the outset that this important monograph gets off to a bad start. A list of Russian intelligence jargon contains at least half a dozen disconcerting mistakes of one sort or another. The text was obviously completed in too much of a hurry, with little regard for consistency. An additional problem is […]

Loosening the Chains

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

In the intellectual history of Europe, the term ‘Enlightenment’ does not readily evoke associations with Germany. The Parisian model of rational sobriety, worldly wit and – not least – increasing secularisation struggled to gain traction in the fissiparous city-states of 18th-century Germany, where centres of intellectual activity were only ever as influential as their neighbours’ […]

Persian Persuasion

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

Two points need to be established at the outset. First, in spite of its title, this book has absolutely nothing to do with Jane Austen, beyond the coincidental fact that the novelist was alive for two of the four years covered in these pages. True, there is a real-life character called D’Arcy to be encountered […]

How to Poison a King

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

In early March 1625, King James I fell ill with what was initially diagnosed as a mild fever. His physicians were not unduly concerned but, contrary to expectations, the fever did not abate or follow the predicted course. Although James was usually reluctant to take medicine, it emerged that on becoming unwell he had imbibed […]

The Tragic Idea

Posted on by David Gelber

Titus Andronicus has always been the joker in the Shakespeare pack. The play is violent even by Elizabethan standards and not only violent but gruesomely and grotesquely horrible. Not surprisingly, therefore, it could never be made to conform to the image of Shakespeare evolved in Victorian England. The presence in the Shakespeare canon of such […]

Mercian Hymns

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

In the early pages of In the Land of Giants, Max Adams quotes an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poem that describes the shattered stone shells and jagged masonry still standing, three centuries after the end of the Roman occupation of Britain. ‘A hundred generations/have passed away since then. This wall, grey with lichen/and red of hue, outlives […]

Martial Artistry

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

I was going to start this review with a joke about the ‘Last Samurai’ Saigō Takamori’s testicles, which were huge, but as it would take more than four hundred words to tell, I shall refrain. Instead, to have any chance of describing Alexander Bennett’s close investigation into the culture of the Japanese sword and those who […]

At Your Own Risk

Posted on by David Gelber

Why write about sex? begs the Introduction to this volume of assorted think-pieces, short stories and articles. Why add to the tawdry glut, insist the editors, before wondering, a few lines down, if taboo and shame ‘are among the necessary products of capitalism’; and by the time they’ve ended up with –  Pleasure, Roland Barthes […]

Escaping the Vicoli

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

Genoa is the Italian city everyone forgets. A goodly number of Italians are on hand to claim that, awkwardly stuck as it is in their nation’s top-left corner, it does not really belong in Italy at all. Such negativity tends to define the place more broadly. Although van Dyck learned his craft as a portrait […]

Martha, My Dear

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

When Britain’s thirteen North American colonies embarked on the organised resistance to the crown that would result in first a revolution and then their independence, their leadership was wildly impressive but disparate. Samuel Adams, a Puritan tax collector from Boston, and Benjamin Franklin, writer, printer, inventor, traveller and polymath, were the radical elder statesmen; the […]

Natural Leader

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

In the 19th century, the American elite found itself caught between two worlds. To the east, across the Atlantic, was civilisation. To the west, over the Appalachians, was the rugged wilderness. How could the Yankee establishment be simultaneously sophisticated and agrarian? How could they hold their heads up high in the courts of Europe while […]

Enemy of Promise

Posted on by David Gelber

The other day I bumped into a friend who had not seen me for some time. I asked about his life, and he then asked about mine. Was I still enjoying being Literary Editor of the Spectator? I told him that I had not held this post for some months and that I now lived […]

A Diverting Read

Posted on by David Gelber

‘You know, confessed Her Royal Highness Princess Teti (Teresa to us) of Orléans and Bragança to the engaging young author of this picaresque ‘look’ at royalty in exile, ‘I go to bed each night thanking God there are so many snobs in the world to keep us around’. Publishers must echo her sentiments for there […]

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