Sir john strachey biography of martin luther
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Martin Luther's Body: The “Stout Doctor” and His Biographers
LUTHER'S IMAGE AS
A monumental figure, then, was firmly established. His life story became equally heroic. Biographies of various kinds began to be written soon after his death, and they, too, conveyed a surprisingly strong sense of their hero's body. But the work that probably did the most to shape the picture of the reformer's personality, appearing at the same time as these biographies and images of Luther, was the celebrated Table Talk or Tischreden. Here, too, images played a crucial part: many versions of the classic were prefaced by a woodcut bust portrait of the nowfamiliar broad-shouldered reformer and an illustration of him at the table with the War, it shows Luther as thin. See Geisberg and Strauss, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 3: 1186-1187, for two versions of it. The failure to make capital out of Luther's bulk is even more striking because works from the same period, including the man
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India at 75: Colonised & Decolonised
By Chandini Jaswal
“They shot up like volcanic lava”, wrote Robert Delavignette, a former French colonial administrator, about the independence movements that had occurred in the europeisk colonial possessions. Initially, Decolonisation appeared to be a force “gathering from deep causes and bursting forth uncontrollably” i.e. more physical and political independence as the colonists agreed to depart from the country (Betts 2012: 23). Decolonisation, in simple words, refers to the withdrawal of the coloniser from the oppressed country. But does political decolonisation guarantee that the colony is free? Is complete decolonisation even possible? More importantly, would the colonies even want that to happen? As India celebrates her independence on August 15, inom look at her sökande eller uppdrag of 75 years to extricate herself from her colonial past— and how successful she has been in doing so.
“To other countries, inom may go as a tourist, but to India, I komma
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The Autobiography of Biography
I have always been averse to theorizing about the art or craft of biography. Like Disraeli’s biographer, Lord Blake, who offers the cautionary analogy of the biographical centipede unsure of her next step because of too much cerebration, I have made it my practice to let the facts find the theory. A preoccupation with theory has been a defensive response by academic biographers in this country, I submit, to the condescension of traditional humanists and social scientists pervading higher education for many years.
The truth of this observation was conceded a few years ago by David Nasaw, as he introduced a roundtable discussion of biography for The American Historical Review. He opined that, in the spirit of Leon Edel, “biography remains the [history] profession’s unloved stepchild, occasionally but grudgingly let in the door, more often shut outside with the riffraff.” Ten years ago, most history departments still discouraged dissert