Richard Bartholomew (Author of 30 Second Religion (Hardback) /anglais)

Richard Bartholomew rated a book it was amazing The New Annotated Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The mysterious "Mr Hyde" first came to public attention after he was named by a witness as the murderer of Sir Danvers Carew, a member of parliament killed with great brutality in a seemingly random street attack. However, the case was a frustrating ...more
Sep 27, 2026 09:37AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The New Annotated Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The New Annotated Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Richard Bartholomew rated a book really liked it Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy by Malcolm Gaskill	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
In the early 1970s, the rector of the small Essex town of Manningtree complained of being “bombarded with enquiries” about Matthew Hopkins, the notorious witchfinder who had lived in town in the 1640s. This “Hopkinsmania”, as he called it, was mostly ...more
Sep 22, 2026 12:39AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Witchfinders by Malcolm Gaskill. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Witchfinders by Malcolm Gaskill <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Richard Bartholomew rated a book it was amazing An Occupation for Gentlemen by Fredric Warburg	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The year 1935 was a challenging time to be setting up business as a London publisher, and the difficulties and pitfalls were highlighted by news that the firm of Martin Secker was in trouble and looking for a new owner despite being a “literary sensa ...more
Aug 01, 2026 06:19AM · 1 like · like · see review
Richard Bartholomew rated a book liked it Comeback: An Actor's Direction by James Fox	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
In the early 1970s, the young British actor and up-and-coming film star James Fox famously threw over his career for evangelical work among university students in the north of England, initially supporting himself with a mundane day job as a salesman ...more
Jul 03, 2026 01:21AM · like · see review
Richard Bartholomew rated a book really liked it Dracula in Istanbul: The Unauthorized Version of the Gothic Classic by Ali Riza Seyfi	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The supposed identification of Count Dracula with the fifteenth-century Wallachian ruler Vlad III Țepeș (“The Impaler”) is today so embedded in popular culture that it is perhaps surprising to learn that there is some debate over the matter. This is ...more
Jun 08, 2026 02:29PM · like · see review
Richard Bartholomew rated a book really liked it Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Publishers are occasionally shamed into withdrawing fabricated “misery memoirs”, but this is never likely to happen to the works of genre pioneer Beatrice Sparks, who between 1971 and 2005 produced a stream of “edited diaries” and interview material ...more
Jun 08, 2026 07:46AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Unmask Alice by Rick Emerson. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Unmask Alice by Rick Emerson <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Richard Bartholomew rated a book it was amazing The Jameses: A Family Narrative by R.W.B. Lewis	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
There are only two Jameses who are generally known to the educated public, and even then many people who read (or watch adaptations of) Henry James don’t know that his brother was the famous philosopher and psychologist William James, while students ...more
May 01, 2026 04:05AM · like · see review
Richard Bartholomew rated a book really liked it This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World by Andrea di Robilant	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
In the mid-sixteenth century, a sensational three-volume work published in Venice by Tommaso Giunti transformed Europe's understanding of its place in the wider world. Delle navigationi et viaggi, or "Journeys and Navigations", with cartography by Gi ...more
Mar 08, 2026 12:06PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of This Earthly Globe by Andrea di Robilant. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — This Earthly Globe by Andrea di Robilant <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Richard Bartholomew rated a book really liked it Monty Python: The Case Against by Robert Hewison	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
As of 2025, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" is among the most popular songs played at funerals in the UK, and jokes from Monty Python's Life of Brian are embedded in the country's popular culture. Meanwhile, one of the film's creators, Micha ...more
Mar 08, 2026 12:02PM · like · see review

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The New Annotated Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson

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The mysterious "Mr Hyde" first came to public attention after he was named by a witness as the murderer of Sir Danvers Carew, a member of parliament killed with great brutality in a seemingly random street attack. However, the case was a frustrating The mysterious "Mr Hyde" first came to public attention after he was named by a witness as the murderer of Sir Danvers Carew, a member of parliament killed with great brutality in a seemingly random street attack. However, the case was a frustrating one for Inspector Newcomen of Scotland Yard – who unlike his more famous colleague had no consulting detective to help him out:

Mr. Hyde had disappeared out of the ken of the police as though he had never existed. Much of his past was unearthed, indeed, and all disreputable: tales came out of the man’s cruelty, at once so callous and violent; of his vile life, of his strange associates, of the hatred that seemed to have surrounded his career; but of his present whereabouts, not a whisper.

Stevenson leaves the details of this "vile life" to the imagination – a striking contrast with how the story has been treated by the innumerable adaptations that have appeared since the book was first published in 1886. In many of these, Hyde exerts coercive control over a marginal woman from a lower social class while his alter ego Dr Henry Jeykll (properly pronounced "JEE-kul") has a "respectable" love interest, but no such characters appear in this novel and some critics instead detect an allegory of being closeted. Dr Jekyll is unmarried and about fifty years old; his lawyer Gabriel Utterson suspects that Hyde’s hold over him is due to blackmail, but he also infers that Hyde, who appears younger, is Jekyll’s “favourite”.

As with his earlier annotated editions ( Sherlock Holmes and Dracula ), Leslie Klinger’s notes range widely across points of historical interest, archaic turns of phrases and parallels with other literary works, along with close attention to character motivations and suggestive plot details. It is an odd coincidence that Hyde struck down Sir Danvers just as he was on the way to post a letter to Utterson, and Klinger notes that when the matter is brought to his attention "all that Utterson is concerned about here is covering up the connection to his client Dr. Henry Jekyll to the crime". And was Sir Danvers really roaming the streets late at night just to post a letter? Klinger suspects "sexual tourism". When Utterson first introduces himself to Hyde he describes himself as being "of Gaunt Street" – there was no such street in Victorian London, and Klinger suggests that Utterson gave a false address reminiscent of Great Gaunt Street and Gaunt Square from Vanity Fair. But is this Utterson’s obfuscation or Stevenson’s? Should we infer some overlap with the world of Becky Sharp?

Klinger also includes criticisms by Frederic W.H. Myers, such as that Hyde’s style of speaking is "too elevated" when talking to Dr Lanyon. Stevenson agreed, pleading to Myers in a letter the "white-hot haste" in writing the story. But this seems to me an unwarranted concession – Jekyll and Hyde may look different, but they share memories and Hyde comes to Lanyon as a supplicant needing help. It seems likely Hyde would have drawn on Jekyll’s knowledge of what sort of rhetoric would be likely to convince Lanyon – and, of course, Lanyon may himself have toned down any coarse expressions by Hyde in his report of their meeting. One interesting detail late in the story is the discovery of "of a pious work, for which Jekyll had several times expressed a great esteem, annotated, in his own hand with startling blasphemies" – were these crude obscenities scrawled across the pages, or more considered and cynical sneers?

As noted by Chesterton, the story shows not that one man is two people but that two people are one man. Jekyll describes how, as Hyde, he had taken an address in Soho and "engaged as a housekeeper a creature whom I knew well to be silent and unscrupulous" – Klinger infers that this must mean that Jekyll was already leading a secret double-life in Soho before the duality was heightened by his experiments. And Hyde, hunted by the police, wants to transform back into Jekyll – he does not regard the prospect as being the loss of his own self.

Klinger’s edition includes textual variations from Stevenson’s notebook and the printer’s copy, both in the notes and in an appendix. There is also a list of "notable stage and screen productions" and then of "notable graphic adaptations" – exhaustive, although as I noted in relation to Dracula, it’s a shame that audio doesn’t get any attention. Illustrations from various editions are reproduced, in some cases side by side so that different interpretations can be compared. There’s also a short foreword by Joe Hill (called the introduction) and a long introduction by Klinger (called the foreword) on how the book came to the written, its public reception (which included "an overflowing congregation" at a Sunday church service because the vicar intended to "preach upon" the book), and summaries of the most famous classic adaptations. ...more

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Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy
by Malcolm Gaskill

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In the early 1970s, the rector of the small Essex town of Manningtree complained of being “bombarded with enquiries” about Matthew Hopkins, the notorious witchfinder who had lived in town in the 1640s. This “Hopkinsmania”, as he called it, was mostly ...more

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An Occupation for Gentlemen
by Fredric Warburg

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The year 1935 was a challenging time to be setting up business as a London publisher, and the difficulties and pitfalls were highlighted by news that the firm of Martin Secker was in trouble and looking for a new owner despite being a “literary sensa ...more

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Comeback: An Actor's Direction
by James Fox

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In the early 1970s, the young British actor and up-and-coming film star James Fox famously threw over his career for evangelical work among university students in the north of England, initially supporting himself with a mundane day job as a salesman ...more

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Dracula in Istanbul: The Unauthorized Version of the Gothic Classic
by Ali Riza Seyfi

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The supposed identification of Count Dracula with the fifteenth-century Wallachian ruler Vlad III Țepeș (“The Impaler”) is today so embedded in popular culture that it is perhaps surprising to learn that there is some debate over the matter. This is The supposed identification of Count Dracula with the fifteenth-century Wallachian ruler Vlad III Țepeș (“The Impaler”) is today so embedded in popular culture that it is perhaps surprising to learn that there is some debate over the matter. This is despite hints dropped by the Count himself as recorded by his reluctant and bewildered houseguest Jonathan Harker, as well as Abraham Van Helsing’s assertion that “he must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land.” As explained by Kim Newman in his foreword to this translation of a Turkish account of Dracula, “literary and film Draculas” of recent decades that reference Vlad owe a great deal to a 1972 study called In Search of Dracula, by Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally; however, Newman describes their work as “this by-no-means-uncontentious book”, while Leslie Klinger’s New Annotated Dracula (reviewed here), refers to its “erroneous theory”.

In contrast, the Turkish Dracula story presented here, first published in 1928, is unambiguous. The title Dracula in Istanbul is borrowed from a 1953 film adaptation (the first to show the Count crawling down the outside of his castle), but when the book came out it was called Kazıklı Voyvoda, or The Impaling Voivode. The text records Resuhî Bey, a Sufi scientist strongly reminiscent of Van Helsing, immediately recognising the vampire as “responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, and tens of thousands of Turks, near the Danube River”, and in his pep talk to his band of vampire-hunters he recounts old stories of Vlad’s atrocities and violations of the rules of embassy. While Dracula in London was an exotic foreign aristocrat, in Istanbul he was an ancient national enemy whose defeat is a matter of patriotic imperative as much as public safety and private justice.

Unlike Van Helsing, Resuhî was able to rely on local knowledge in the battle against the vampire. As recorded by his old student Afif Bey (a counterpart to John Seward, although without Seward’s drug habit), Resuhî’s father was from Of, and Resuhî grew up hearing his cousins’ “witch stories”. In Turkish terms, Resuhî tells Afif, Count Dracula is a “Cadı” (witch) or “Hortlak” (ghoul), words Afif would have known had he “dealt with the stories (folklore) of Trabzon and its surrounding areas, or even had spoken with people who came from the Rumeli and Skopje areas”. In such places there were societies called “cadıcı” and “hortlakçi” to fight against such malign supernatural entities.

According to Ali Riza Seyfioğlu, Kazıklı Voyvoda was assembled from documents “wrapped in old newspaper” that he found abandoned on a Bosphorus ferry. The English-language translation is presented by the American publisher as an “unauthorized version” of Stoker’s novel and as “bootlegged”, but perhaps the 1920s setting allows us to see it (unlike the Icelandic version reviewed here) instead as a sequel: “Failed in London, Try Istanbul”. For some reason, however, Dracula found himself doomed to act out a variation of the scenario he went through in London a couple of decades before (and perhaps before that in Wisborg), with uncannily close Turkish equivalents of all the main antagonists he had faced in England.

The 1953 film, directed by Mehmet Muhtar, is the focus of an afterword by Iain Robert Smith, following which some movie stills are reproduced. ...more

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Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries
by Rick Emerson (Goodreads Author)

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Publishers are occasionally shamed into withdrawing fabricated “misery memoirs”, but this is never likely to happen to the works of genre pioneer Beatrice Sparks, who between 1971 and 2005 produced a stream of “edited diaries” and interview material Publishers are occasionally shamed into withdrawing fabricated “misery memoirs”, but this is never likely to happen to the works of genre pioneer Beatrice Sparks, who between 1971 and 2005 produced a stream of “edited diaries” and interview material that supposedly revealed the inner lives of troubled and tragic American teens. Sparks was denounced as a fraud long before Emerson’s book-length treatment, but publishing executives apparently remain unconcerned about the reputational risk of continuing to make money off a wretched oeuvre that falsely claims the authority of personal experience: a collected edition branded as a series of “Anonymous Diaries” is currently available from Simon & Schuster under its “Books for Young Readers” imprint, while one edition of Spark’s first success and most famous work, Go Ask Alice, is sold by Penguin Random House through its “Vintage Classics” imprint. Meanwhile, Kindle editions in the UK are handled by HarperCollins e-books.

The ethical issue has largely been resolved as far it can be by fudging over whether the books should be categorised as “non-fiction” or “fiction”, although the fabulations extend to Sparks’s self-presentation as a credentialed psychologist and to endorsements from non-existent medical professionals with stereotypically American Jewish names. And even if you take the most indulgent view of “artistic license”, nothing can excuse her 1979 Jay’s Journal, which took a genuine document entrusted to her by the bereaved mother of a depressive teen who had died by suicide and turned it into a salacious story of Satanic ritual and demonic encounter – subjects that had nothing to do with the circumstances. Names and details were changed, but only barely, and “Jay” was quickly identified as Alden Barrett of Pleasant Grove, Utah, very close to Sparks’s home in Provo (a city that, according to Emerson, “leads the nation in white-collar crime”, particularly “affinity fraud”).

Sparks was a Mormon housewife in her fifties who had done some jobbing writing over the years when she hit on the potential of jumping on moral panic bandwagons. The protagonist of Go Ask Alice is a drug addict, although the drug in question was not, as one might expect, heroin or cocaine or even marijuana, but rather LSD. This was perfect for pitching to Art Linkletter, who blamed LSD for his daughter’s suicide. Sparks had a line to Linkletter through a previous writing gig as part of a team churning out motivational essays that would then be recorded by Linkletter onto vinyl for sale through a multi-level marketing scheme, and through Linkletter’s son Jack she got a contract from Prentice Hall. To her chagrin, however, the book deal meant that the work would be credited to “Anonymous”. Go Ask Alice was a sensation that spawned a TV movie featuring Andy Griffith and William Shatner; her follow-up VOICES proved a dud, but Alice gave her credibility when she approached Alden Barrett’s mother.

Emerson keeps referencing to a minimum, and the literary tone is informal and conversational (the author is successful pocaster), even novelistic in places. The author is interested not just in Sparks’s life and works, but also in wider events that contributed to her rise (she eventually reached the National Book Awards). The narrative thus follows some odd twists and turns, including imaginative reconstructions of Albert Hofmann discovering LSD in 1943, and of Richard Nixon formulating his “War on Drugs”. One of Sparks’s early writing jobs brought Sparks into contact with the cartoonist Joseph Barbera; we not just told that Barbera established a line of comic books, but also what was likely going through his head when he decided to do so. This approach does mean, though, that Aldren Barrett’s short life gets the in-depth and sympathetic treatment he deserved.

The Satanic Panic, of course, was/is a multi-stranded phenomenon, even if a writer confines themselves just to the USA (Sparks made an appearance in London in 1981, although no details seem to be available beyond a press photograph) there is a great deal of material to sift through. Emerson takes an impressionistic approach, briefly name-checking the likes of the McMartin Preschool, Michelle Remembers, and the career of Ken Lanning. As a comparator to Sparks, Emerson introduces the notorious Lauren Stratford, described holding forth on Oprah as “a kind of horseshit savant, lying about everything you could imagine” (I was sorry not to see a reference here to the famous exposure of Stratford in the evangelical Cornerstone magazine). Gregory Reid, a pastor who championed Stratford, credits Jay’s Journal with allowing his own repressed memories of abuse to resurface.

In the last part of the book, Emerson describes how Sparks’s “psychologist” persona was shaped and how experiences with teens at Brigham Young University fed into Go Ask Alice (although for privacy reasons details are changed). He also describes his own visit to Pleasant Grove and to Alden Barrett’s former home. ...more

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The Jameses: A Family Narrative
by R.W.B. Lewis

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There are only two Jameses who are generally known to the educated public, and even then many people who read (or watch adaptations of) Henry James don’t know that his brother was the famous philosopher and psychologist William James, while students There are only two Jameses who are generally known to the educated public, and even then many people who read (or watch adaptations of) Henry James don’t know that his brother was the famous philosopher and psychologist William James, while students who are assigned The Varieties of Religious Experience or some other work of William may not be made aware that he was the sibling of the famous literary writer. Their sister Alice, debilitated for much of her life by illness, has some posthumous fame due to her published diaries, but there were also two younger brothers, Garth and Robertson, who unlike their celebrated older brothers saw action in the Civil War. And Henry James was himself more properly “Henry James Jr” until his writings eclipsed those of his Swedenborg-inspired theologian father, a liberal-minded patriarch whose attitudes towards life were a reaction against his own father, a prosperous merchant and local worthy referred to by Lewis as “William James of Albany” to distinguish him from his grandson.

The Jameses synthesises the lives of all seven individuals, along with details about their relatives, spouses and even to some extent their in-laws (Alice’s domestic partner Katharine Loring also gets her due). Henry James Sr was one of eight children borne by Catharine Barber James (William James of Albany’s third wife, following two early bereavements), and his wife Mary Robertson Walsh had sister, Catherine, who was an important presence in the life of the third generation as “Aunt Kate” (although mentioned only briefly, Henry also had a sister, Ellen, who married the son of Martin Van Buren). Aunt Kate makes it onto the cover of the book, as does Alice Howe Gibbens, who married William James. Lewis’s interest in in-laws even extends to a short appendix about the “strange death” by suicide of Alice Gibben’s father Daniel, who got caught up in a Reconstruction-era corruption scandal.

Lewis’s task required the assimilation of a huge amount of material, including a wealth of family papers both in archives and in private hands, as well as familiarity with a variety of subjects: readers interested primarily in intellectual and literary themes are rewarded with judicious summaries and analyses of Wlliam’s and Henry’s writings, but they may find material about the younger brothers and the Civil War a bit of sidetrack – although the fact of having had two younger siblings who had seen warfare while they had not had some lasting impact on Henry and James. Lewis’ account of their military exploits is also lively, perhaps enhanced by Lewis’s own experience as a veteran of World War II. Alice James’s ailments are a way into the world of nineteenth-century medicine – Lewis does not speculate as to what diagnoses such as “rheumatic gout” actually were, but the symptoms suggest some form of myalgic encephalomyelitis before her final breast cancer. Inevitably, there are some longeurs, such as William James’ interminably introspective (and indecisive) letters to his fiancée and wife (occasionally enlivened with flashes of barely euphemised sexual desire, or tactlessly frank appreciations of other women – particularly the young Pauline Goldmark).

Although Henry Sr inherited just a fraction of his father’s immense wealth, he “is said to have murmured ‘leisured for life’” when a court finally confirmed his entitlement. His son Henry Jr is quoted as saying “we were never in a single case, I think, for two generations, guilty of a stroke of business”, although Lewis sees this as misleading, “for the phenomena of money and business agitated the Jamesian mind… to a degree which it is difficult, or even impossible, to match elsewhere in our literary and intellectual history” (by “our”, of course, Lewis is addressing his fellow American readers rather than compatriots of Charles Dickens). It also overlooks the younger brothers’ post-military business affairs, which were botched – perhaps Henry Jr meant “a stroke of successful business”.

William and of course Henry Jr interacted with many currents of intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic, but the “family narrative” angle means that the primary focus is on the ongoing family dialogue. Even Henry James’s famous friendship with Edith Wharton appears scattered over just a few pages, despite Lewis being the author of a comparably large (and prize-winnng) volume about her. Emerson is sporadic presence; William James studied under Louis Agassiz, and through Emerson he got to meet Herman Grimm (son of one of the brothers) and W.C. Dilthey in Germany. One interesting circle is William James’s association with a group of philosophers in Britain called the “Scratch Eight”, which along with James comprised the “intellectually elusive “ Shadworth Hodgson, Edmund Gurney, James Sully, Leslie Stephen and G. Croom Robertson, the editor of Mind. Gurney, with Henry Sidgwick, were founders of the Society of Psychical Research, a subject with which James became increasingly interested following the death of an infant son; James and his wife Alice were impressed by sessions with the Boston medium Leonora Piper. However, it is disappointing to get only a passing mention of Sigmund Freud, despite the day they spent together shortly before James’ death that is described in Gay’s biography of Freud (reviewed here). Henry James’ correspondence with H.G Wells is quoted, and an encounter with G.K. Chesterton in Rye in Sussex noted, but there is no mention of E.F. Benson.

William and Henry’s habits of transatlantic peregrinations go back to childhood: their father seems to have been restless and frequently moved residence, and 1844 saw the family lease a property in Windsor for the summer: “it was called Frogmore Cottage”, Lewis mentions insouciantly, and although he describes the location he doesn’t seem aware of its fame in Britain or the fact that their landlady ultimately would have been the young Queen Victoria. It was here that Henry Snr suffered what he called (using a Swedenborgian term) a “vastation”, later described as “a perfectly insane and adject terror”, a malign presence “raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life”. Lewis attempts to interpret the “squatting horror” while observing that “one proceeds cautiously with such occult matters”. William James describes his own later experience of sudden hallucinatory “philosophic pessimism”, although attributed to a correspondent, in Varieties of Religious Experience.

Henry James was also interested in what he calls “the visitable past”; in 1870s London he cultivated Anne Benson Proctor, who was full of memories of “Keats and Shelley, Byron and Coleridge and [Walter] Landor”; another Byronic encounter was in Italy with Contessa Gamba, whose husband was the nephew of Byron’s mistress Teresa Guiccioli and who possessed unpublished letters. Recounting the story, Henry was told in turn about one Captain Silsbee, who was said to have lodged with the elderly Claire Clairmont and her niece with the aim of getting hold of letters of Byron and Shelley – the story inspired James’s The Aspern Papers.

The last part of the book is an appendix on the “later Jameses”. After such an extensive narrative of nearly 600 pages it is tempting to leave aside an extra essay of 40 pages (in smaller type, to boot!), but it is worth the time and is written in slightly more informal style – it is also here where the author notes his personal contact with some James descendants. William James had four surviving children, and the narrative includes details of their childhood experiences with their parents and “Uncle Henry”. One son, Harry (or Henry III), was a lawyer (and astute investor) who won a Pulitzer for his biography of Charles W. Eliot. A grandson of William James through another son was John Sumner Runnells James, who worked for CIA; this James was an addict and alcoholic, and his daughter recalls he and her step-mother destroying relics of William James’ expedition to Brazil with Louis Agassiz “amid much boozy merriment”. William James’s daughter Peggy, meanwhile, became a university confidant of Marianne Moore. Edward James, a son of Robertson James, offended Uncle Henry by publishing a criminal libel against the Prince of Wales. ...more

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This Earthly Globe by Andrea di Robilant

This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World
by Andrea di Robilant

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In the mid-sixteenth century, a sensational three-volume work published in Venice by Tommaso Giunti transformed Europe's understanding of its place in the wider world. Delle navigationi et viaggi, or "Journeys and Navigations", with cartography by Gi In the mid-sixteenth century, a sensational three-volume work published in Venice by Tommaso Giunti transformed Europe's understanding of its place in the wider world. Delle navigationi et viaggi, or "Journeys and Navigations", with cartography by Giacomo Gastaldi, brought together an array of travel accounts pertaining to Asia, Africa and the Americas, all translated into Italian and including classified material that had been "leaked" to the work's industrious but initially anonymous editor, a studious Venetian official named Giovambattista (or Giovanni Battista) Ramusio.

This Earthly Globe tells the story of Ramusio's life and political times, along with some long digressive narrative retellings taken from some of his sources. Most of the explorers and travellers he drew on were near-contemporaries; one such was Antonio Pigafetta, a survivor of the Magellan expedition. Pigafetta's manuscript Diary was initially of interest European monarchs and the pope more for describing a new route to the Spice Islands than for the extraordinary feat of the first circumnavigation of the world, and Charles V kept his copy under lock and key - early plans to publish it in Venice fell through due to a printer's avarice and the appearance rival volume derived from interview material. Other travellers whose writings made their way into Ramusio's project include Cadamostro, who under the patronage of the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator had explored West Africa a few decades previously; Hasan al-Wazzan, a captured Muslim diplomat from Fez who had been imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo; a delegation sent by the King of Portugal to make contact with Prester John's descendants in Ethiopia; and Ludovico di Varthema, an Italian who had visited Mecca (disguised as a Muslim), India and the Spice Islands. For China, however, Ramusio relied primarily on rather older source: Marco Polo, famous but long dismissed as a fabulist until Ramusio tracked down an early manuscript copy owned by the Ghisi family.

Ramusio and his father Paolo were intimates of the legendary Venetian publisher Aldus Manutis, who specialised in printing editions of Latin and Greek classical works, and the author speculates that a new edition of Strabo's Geography that Ramusio helped bring to fruition following Aldus's death was his "point of departure for a new geography that would take into account the extraordinary discoveries of his time". We are told more than is strictly necessary for the book’s main theme about how Ramusio helped to secure a manuscript of Pliny the Younger#s Letters for Aldus while on a diplomatic mission to France as an aide to Alvise Mocenigo ("whether they obtained them from the resident abbot or whether they secretly smuggled them out of the Abbaye de Saint-Victor with the help of some conniving friar is unclear"); similarly off the point, but interesting, are details of a visit that Aldus received Erasmus, and of how Ramusio's friend Pietro Bembo, at the time one of Aldus’s "star writers and editors", was prevented by the authorities from dedicating a novel to his lover Lucretia (Lucrezia) Borgia – Venice feared the reaction of her husband, the Duke of Ferrara.

Di Robinant’s style is informal, but the digressive travel accounts mean that Ramusio himself sometimes disappears from view – and in the case of Marco Polo, who had been dead more than two hundred years before Ramusio’s project was conceived, there’s a sense of a familiar journey being retrod. There is postscript in which the author visits Ramusio’s villa, which by happy coincidence had been purchased by a geographer named Francesco Vallerani. ...more

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Monty Python: The Case Against
by Robert Hewison

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As of 2025, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" is among the most popular songs played at funerals in the UK, and jokes from Monty Python's Life of Brian are embedded in the country's popular culture. Meanwhile, one of the film's creators, Micha As of 2025, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" is among the most popular songs played at funerals in the UK, and jokes from Monty Python's Life of Brian are embedded in the country's popular culture. Meanwhile, one of the film's creators, Michael Palin, is widely regarded as one of television's most genial and sympathetic presenters, meeting all sorts of people as he criss-crosses the globe making travel programmes. This book, by contrast, recalls a time when "Monty Python" was a byword for controversy and offence.

Monty Python: The Case Against is a short work, its double-column presentation broken up by reproductions of primary sources scattered through the pages: Hewison is an old friend of Palin since university days, and the publisher, Eyre Methuen, appears to have an extensive archive of legal materials and other correspondence relating to its responsibility for producing Python-related tie-in books. While Brian raised the spectre of Britain's then-archaic blasphemy laws, the books and records (the latter produced by Charisma Records) meant navigating issues relating to "copyright, libel and obscenity", and there were also corporate censorship battles: the higher echelons of the BBC were troubled by some of the material they were broadcasting (although they didn’t always understand it, on one occasion misinterpreting a severed arm in a sketch as a "big penis"), and the "mutilation" of their material in the US led to Pythons acting as litigants for a change. American law does not recognise "moral rights", but judges in New York were prepared to consider that cutting up their work might be financially damaging and that "to call the resulting programme 'Monty Python' might be a misdirection under the Lanham Act". The matter was settled, but the Pythons had "made a contribution to the new laws of the entertainment industry."

On the issue of copyright, there was an early skirmish when a firm of ukulele tutors objected to the reproduction of some sheet music in a spoof advertisement; more serious was when a copyright clearance for "Annie's Song" on an LP was disputed on the grounds both that the permission had not been for a parody and that the new lyrics were defamatory of John Denver. A curiosity of obscenity law was that whereas a jury trial might be persuaded to throw out a prosecution case, the law also allowed the police simply to seize materials and ask a magistrate to authorise their destruction. The Pythons did bend when proportionate, agreeing to remove a passing sexual reference from a printed monologue to prevent a publishing schedule being derailed.

The battle over Brian, of course, is the most celebrated controversy, and the title for Chapter 5 – "This Sick Enterprise" – is taken from a quote from the Nationwide Festival of Light, which overlapped with Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners Association. A few years previously, NVLA had successfully sued Gay News over a "blasphemous" poem, and the Pythons turned to the paper's barrister, John Mortimer, for advice. Given the litany of comdemnation from various clerics, it is interesting that Graham Chapman received a supportive hand-written letter from a canon of St George's, Windsor (from the acknowledgements identifiable as James Atherton Fisher), who based on his reading of the script and a tape of the dialogue took the view that, while the film may be offensive, it "is not meant to be blasphemous and that it is extracting the maximum comedy out of false religion… and out of all who use religion as a cover for their particular form of sin".

The publisher of the tie-in book was also nervous until the film was cleared for release by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) as an "AA" without cuts; however, the printer still refused to handle it after taking advice from John Smyth, the barrister who had previously brought the case against Gay News (more recently, it has come to light that Smyth was a notorious flagellomanic obsessed with beating boys, and may have been responsible for a fatality in Africa – the discovery of the scandal led to the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury over his knowledge of Smyth's predilections).

The final chapter deals with the furore around the release of the film, focusing on the USA and the UK but also surveying other countries. In Britain, local councils could censor what cinemas were allowed to show, creating a bizarrely haphazard approach: Hewison quotes James Ferman, the Secretary of the BBFC as describing West Yorkshire as "the most heavily-censored area in the English-speaking world – and that includes South Africa." The Pythons refused to allow a compromise where some cinemas offered to exhibit the film as an "X" certificate. Abroad, Norway worked around censorship by simply not giving certain lines Norwegian subtitles, which had minimal impact in a country where English is widely understood. As expected, this chapter also includes an account of the famous TV chat-show clash with Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood. ...more

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