Sam Leith
Desperately Seeking Puttenham
Not long ago, the historian and MP Tristram Hunt wrote a piece in The Guardian waxing wistful about the news that, in a joint venture with Google, the British Library plans to put 250,000 books from between 1700 and 1870 online.
‘When everything is down-loadable,’ Hunt declared, ‘the mystery of history can be lost. Why sit in an archive leafing through impenetrable prose when you can slurp frappucino while scrolling down Edmund Burke documents? … it is only with MS in hand that the real meaning of the text
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From the archive: Kenneth Rose on the life of Princess Alice of Battenberg
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-trumped-them-all
'The trick of a successful mercenary ... was somehow to get on almost as well with your enemies as your allies, since those two positions could be reversed at dizzying speed.'
Sarah Dunant on the life of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/scholar-in-arms
'McDormand has come closer to Lady Macbeth in some of her previous grimly comic performances ... Here she can convey only the banality of evil, as when she fussily curtails the banquet after Macbeth’s hallucination.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/come-thick-night