John Stubbs
Coy Poet
Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon
By Nigel Smith
Yale University Press 352pp £25 order from our bookshop
Late one night in December 1671, a band of soldiers fell upon a man outside his London lodgings. He was ambushed returning from a late supper. Having beaten and pinned him to the ground, the troopers made a point of disfiguring him – slitting his nose – before neighbours and passers-by drove them away. The victim, Sir John Coventry, was an MP. Shortly before the incident, he had made an unwise, if well-received, joke in the Commons about the salacious tendencies of Charles II. The king, it seemed, made his feelings on the matter clear in the street.
The incident was recorded angrily by Andrew Marvell, a fellow MP and a hard-working campaigner for religious reform and toleration. To Marvell – as to us now – the affair encapsulated all that was wrong and dark in Restoration England. He stood against it as a diligent parliamentarian,
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'"The Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back
'To her enemies she was the alien temptress who led Charles I away from the "true religion" of Protestantism and towards royal absolutism.'
Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews @LeandadeLisle's 'colourful', 'persuasive' new biography of Henrietta Maria.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/royalist-generalissima
'Empathy is our moral portal gun, and it jams from underuse.'
Don Paterson on Portal 2, catching Covid on the Eurostar, and rereading Ian Hamilton’s 'Against Oblivion'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony