the spectator
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This Week in Books: The French Revolution: From Enlightenment to Tyranny
Welcome to This Week in Books, where we highlight books just released by small and independent presses. Books have always been a symbol for and means of spreading knowledge and wisdom, and they are an important part of our toolkit…
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Ancient Advice on Getting Old
When it comes to offering tips for those growing old, apart from sitting on the sofa thinking smugly about all your great achievements, Cicero recommends taking up agriculture. For The Spectator, Richard Ingrams reviews Tom Payne’s The Ancient Art of…
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A Dickensian History of Capitalism
…we should return to the pages of Dickens and Trollope to remind ourselves that there were wrong ’uns at every level and turn of 19th-century commerce, from crooked agents, clerks, brokers and jobbers to ‘lords on the take, knights on…
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A Room of Chaucer’s Own
With the help of a wonderfully ingenious pattern of inferences — in particular an architectural drawing from 200 years later which happened to include a sketch of Aldgate’s north tower at its margins — Paul Strohm is able to reconstruct…