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Biography & Memoir (34)
History & Classics (25)
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Psychology & Anthropology (1)
Michael Wood: 'Anomalisa', 21 April 2016
directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson.
"... we were. But then sometimes the distinction collapses, or is displaced, as in Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson's stop-motion film Anomalisa, based on a play Kaufman wrote in 2005. When Michael Stone, the author of a bestselling book about improving human relations in business, has a psychological meltdown, we don't quite know what sort of mind he is ..."
Taking Sides
John Mullan: On the high road with Bonnie Prince Charlie, 22 January 2004
The '45: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Untold Story of the Jacobite Rising
by Christopher Duffy.
Cassell, 639 pp., £20, March 2003, 0 304 35525 9Show More
Samuel Johnson in Historical Context
edited by J.C.D. Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill.
Palgrave, 336 pp., £55, December 2001, 0 333 80447 3Show More
"... for news of the battle, sailed into an exile that seemed likely to be permanent. True, the Duke of Cumberland's army, brilliantly circumvented by the rebels in a diversionary movement on the march south, remained intact, waiting outside Northampton for events to unfold. Yet, as we know from diaries and letters of the period, many of London's ..."
Michael Wood: 'Kind Hearts and Coronets', 4 July 2019
"... when he completed his current task, because 'after using the silken rope' required for a duke, he could 'never again be content with hemp'? Asked how he manages to be so calm on the eve of his death, our murderer says: 'Dr Johnson was, as always, right when he observed: "Depend upon it, sir, when a man ..."
R.W. Johnson: Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico., 4 April 2002
Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage
by Joseph Persico.
Random House, 656 pp., £24.50, October 2001, 0 375 50246 7Show More
"... the camera. The American journalist Fulton Oursler came to see the President on a mission from the Duke of Windsor, then Governor of the Bahamas. To Oursler's horror, the Duke had told him that 'it would be a tragic thing for the world if Hitler were overthrown. Hitler is a great man, the right and logical leader of the ..."
Richard J. Evans: Hitler's Aristocratic Go-Betweens, 17 March 2016
Go-Betweens for Hitler
by Karina Urbach.
Oxford, 389 pp., £20, July 2015, 978 0 19 870366 2Show More
"... Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany; the queens of Greece, Norway, Romania, Spain and Sweden; Grand Duke Louis IV of Hesse; the grand duchesses Victoria and Elisabeth and the tsarina Alexandra of Russia; Prince Alfred of Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha; Princess Alexandra of Hohenlohe-Langenburg; Princess Beatrice de Orléans y Borbón, Duchess of Galliera; Prince ..."
For his Nose was as sharpe as a Pen, and a Table of greene fields
Michael Dobson: The Yellow Shakespeare, 10 May 2007
William Shakespeare, Complete Works: The RSC Shakespeare
edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.
Macmillan, 2486 pp., £30, April 2007, 978 0 230 00350 7Show More
"... with the corrections and illustrations of Various Commentators; To which are added notes by Sam. Johnson. This edition, with its much reprinted preface and doggedly commonsensical approach to the text, still exerts a palpable influence on Shakespeare scholars: Jonathan Bate's introduction to this new edition of the Complete Works makes regular appeals to ..."
Napoleon's Near Miss
Linda Colley, 18 April 1985
Napoleon: The Myth of the Saviour
by Jean Tulard, translated by Teresa Waugh.
Weidenfeld, 470 pp., £14.95, June 1984, 0 297 78439 0Show More
Alexis: Tsar of All the Russias
by Philip Longworth.
Secker, 319 pp., £15, June 1984, 0 436 25688 6Show More
"... to establish Oliver Cromwell securely in the Victorian pantheon. The names of Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington summon up public houses rather than heroes. Winston Churchill in this century, like the Elder Pitt in the 18th and the Younger Pitt in the 19th, was buried with ceremony then swiftly consigned to history: which means that for the bulk of the ..."
Fetch the Scissors
Colin Burrow: B.S. Johnson, 11 April 2013
Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of B.S. Johnson
edited by Jonathan Coe, Philip Tew and Julia Jordan.
Picador, 471 pp., £25, February 2013, 978 1 4472 2710 6Show More
Trawl
by B.S. Johnson.
Picador, 183 pp., £12.99, February 2013, 978 1 4472 0036 9Show More
Albert Angelo
Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry
House Mother Normal
"... Until very recently I had never read any B.S. Johnson. I had a staticky reminiscence of what he might have been, which could be represented, using his own idiosyncratic conventions for marking the lapses that run through our consciousness of the world, as 'experimental … . suicide … . wrists was it?'To clear the static first: these reprints are to celebrate what would have been the eightieth birthday of the novelist B ..."
It's Mummie
Jenny Diski, 16 December 1993
The Little Princesses
by Marion Crawford, introduced by A.N. Wilson.
Duckworth, 128 pp., £14.99, November 1993, 0 7156 2497 0Show More
"... did I know then's and 'Fate was marching up on me's. Once she enters the employ of the Duke and Duchess of York, you are pitched into a world of ineffable middle-class vapidity that reminds you of cloud fluff. Mr and Mr Darling lived there before Peter Pan came and troubled things, and later Celia Johnson and ..."
Laundering Britain's Past
Marilyn Butler, 12 September 1991
The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830
by Paul Johnson.
Weidenfeld, 1095 pp., £25, September 1991, 0 297 81207 6Show More
"... Paul Johnson's thousand-page book is geared to the present age of long print runs and mass marketing. It is one of the currently popular narrative histories written by Britons who position themselves mid-Atlantic, in order to address the American reader. At a thousand pages Johnson's book is longer than Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1988 (subtitle, 'Economic Change and Military Conflict, 1500-2000'), or Simon Schama's Citizens, 1989 ..."
Cardenio's Ghost
Charles Nicholl: The Bits Shakespeare Wrote, 2 December 2010
The Arden Shakespeare: Double Falsehood
edited by Brean Hammond.
Arden Shakespeare, 443 pp., £16.99, March 2010, 978 1 903436 77 6Show More
"... The King's Men performed the play again on 8 June 1613, at a courtly soirée in honour of the Duke of Savoy's ambassador, Giovanni Battista Gabaleoni, Marquis de Villa. He was a fan of English theatre – 'he makes no great dainty of himself,' the letter-writer John Chamberlain noted, 'but goes with his troupe to the ordinary plays.' Payment for ..."
Divided We Grow
John Barrell: When Pitt Panicked, 5 June 2003
The London Corresponding Society 1792-99
edited by Michael T. Davis.
Pickering & Chatto, £495, June 2002, 1 85196 734 6Show More
Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty
by Helen Braithwaite.
"... and history, and would function as a pressure group to persuade the Government to adopt the 'Duke of Richmond's plan', the twin reforms of universal manhood suffrage and annual parliaments which the Duke had supported a decade before but had since abandoned. The LCS was never very large: at its most successful, it ..."
Why the richest woman in Britain changed her will 26 times
Mark Kishlansky: The Duchess of Marlborough, 14 November 2002
The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough
by Ophelia Field.
Hodder, 575 pp., £20, June 2002, 9780340768075Show More
"... when she was 13, she joined the household of Mary of Modena, the 15-year-old second wife of the Duke of York (the future James II). She was later transferred to entertain his younger daughter, the emotionally, intellectually and physically challenged Princess Anne. This was hardly a plum position: Anne was third in line to the throne with the likelihood ..."
Riparian
Douglas Johnson, 15 July 1982
The Left Bank: Writers in Paris, from Popular Front to Cold War
by Herbert Lottman.
Heinemann, 319 pp., £12.50, May 1982, 0 434 42943 0Show More
"... guru-ship, what the Falls Road is for Belfast Catholics. At first sight this is surprising. As the Duke of Wellington said, because you are born in a stable you are not necessarily a horse, and because you are a writer and publish something and happen to live in a certain area of Paris, which is in any case large and densely populated, you are not necessarily ..."
Barchester Popes
The Popes and European Revolution
by Owen Chadwick.
Oxford, 646 pp., £28, March 1981, 0 19 826919 6Show More
"... own bishops, the ruler of Naples appointed his own judge of ecclesiastical affairs and the Grand-Duke of Tuscany had the excellent idea of threatening to organise a schism which would acutely embarrass the Holy Father. Thus, in the 18th century, the Papacy is inevitably seen to have declined both in effective power and in general reputation, and historians ..."