Nicholas Humphrey

Nicholas Humphrey is assistant director of research at the Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour at Cambridge University.

Letter

Animal Trials

5 December 2013

The stories of Europe’s animal trials are ever worth retelling, but missing from Edward Payson Evans’s compendium of criminal prosecutions against both animals and objects is perhaps the strangest case of all, and the only case I know of from Great Britain: the trial for murder of a statue of the Virgin Mary, which took place in the Welsh village of Hawarden in the year 946 (LRB, 5 December). According...
Letter

Cognitive Closure

10 September 1992

Colin McGinn, in reviewing my A History of the Mind (LRB, 10 September), complains that I ignore certain philosophical distinctions dear to his own heart – and puts it down to my unsophistication and naivety. But it is not so much that I don’t understand the distinctions he thinks so important as that I don’t believe there is any further mileage in them. As McGinn and other traditionalists writing...
Letter

Syllogisms of grass

6 December 1979

SIR: I see that, in Blake’s words, I have ‘thrown the sand against the wind, and the wind has thrown it back again’.I had not realised Gregory Bateson (Letters, 24 January) was such a master at affirming the consequent. He can even use it as a method of disparaging a critic:Humphrey did not think much of my book.A dreary pedant would not think much of my book.Humphrey is a dreary pedant.Not only...

Getting the wiggle into the act

Colin McGinn, 10 September 1992

Consciousness is not sempiternal, it has a history, a natural genesis. Once upon a time the universe contained no consciousness; then it sprang up here and there; and now the planet is flooded...

Read more reviews

Pictures of Ourselves

P.N. Johnson-Laird, 22 December 1983

During World War Two, my father was walking out of a greengrocer’s shop in London when a flying bomb crashed and exploded nearby. The blast swept him off his feet, but he was otherwise...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences