Not Altogether Lost

James Hamilton-Paterson: The Tasaday, 19 June 2003

Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday 
by Robin Hemley.
Farrar, Straus, 352 pp., $25, May 2003, 0 374 17716 3
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... was always a confounding issue. As early as 1971, experienced anthropologists such as Robert Fox and Zeus Salazar had observed that since the group’s nearest neighbours were barely two and a half miles away it was only reasonable to suppose they must have been having regular outside contact. Others seemed to have a vested interest in proving the ...

Diary

Joseph Epstein: A Thinker Thinks, 20 September 1984

... of mind? One thinks here of Isaiah Berlin’s distinction in his famous essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, which begins with its quotation from the Greek poet Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Some thinkers spend their entire lives mining one or two central ideas, building and ...
The Dons 
by Noël Annan.
HarperCollins, 357 pp., £17.99, November 1999, 0 00 257074 2
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A Man of Contradictions: A Life of A.L.Rowse 
by Richard Ollard.
Allen Lane, 368 pp., £20, October 1999, 0 7139 9353 7
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... tracing the links between one family and the next, is constructed around the metaphor of a fox-hunt: ‘having started a fox in the Pytchley country, we pursue it on a 200-mile point straight across the Midlands, ending on the edge of the Beaufort. So in our pursuit of this class we will start from one family and ...

Bon Garçon

David Coward: La Fontaine’s fables, 7 February 2002

Complete Tales in Verse 
by Jean de La Fontaine, translated by Guido Waldman.
Carcanet, 334 pp., £14.95, October 2000, 9781857544824
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The Fables of La Fontaine: Wisdom Brought down to Earth 
by Andrew Calder.
Droz, 234 pp., £36.95, September 2001, 2 600 00464 5
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The Craft of La Fontaine 
by Maya Slater.
Fairleigh Dickinson, 255 pp., $43.50, May 2001, 0 8386 3920 8
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... winced at his cynical promotion of self-interest, and for Rousseau the method employed by the fox to relieve the crow of its cheese was as much an advertisement for flattery as a warning against flatterers. But though they mistook his observations of human behaviour for universal precepts, La Fontaine must take some of the blame. He was an awkward kind of ...

Lawful Resistance

Blair Worden, 24 November 1988

Algernon Sidney and the English Republic 1623-1677 
by Jonathan Scott.
Cambridge, 258 pp., £27.50, August 1988, 0 521 35290 8
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Seeds of Liberty: 1688 and the Shaping of Modern Britain 
by John Miller.
Souvenir, 128 pp., £15.95, July 1988, 0 285 62839 9
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Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 
by W.A. Speck.
Oxford, 267 pp., £17.50, July 1988, 9780198227687
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War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough 
by D.W. Jones.
Blackwell, 351 pp., £35, September 1988, 0 631 16069 8
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Robert Harley: Speaker, Secretary of State and Premier Minister 
by Brian Hill.
Yale, 259 pp., £25, June 1988, 0 300 04284 1
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A Kingdom without a King: The Journal of the Provisional Government in the Revolution of 1688 
by Robert Beddard.
Phaidon, 192 pp., £14.95, November 1988, 9780714825007
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... upon the troubled passage of the Revolution’s reputation across the centuries. The deposition of James left the English with a guilty conscience which they have never shaken off. The men who drove the lawful hereditary ruler from the throne and replaced him by a usurping Dutchman searched vainly for a theory to justify their coup. They might claim that ...

Strange Loops

James Lighthill, 24 January 1980

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid 
by Douglas Hofstadter.
Harvester, 777 pp., £10.50, August 1980, 0 85527 757 2
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... which can be caricatured as the statement that brains act like computers. It is made easier fox the author to believe by the outdated, simplistic view of the individual neuron (almost like a logic gate in a computer) which he describes on page 340. A few pages later, the book suggests that he is acquainted with some of the long-established evidence for ...

Diary

Duncan McLean: Frank Sargeson, 7 June 2018

... about her fellow New Zealander, the writer Janet Frame. In the film we see Frame, played by Kerry Fox, recently released from a long spell in a mental hospital, given shelter and support by a white-goateed older writer called Frank Sargeson, played by Martyn Sanderson. She lives and types in his garden shed, finishes a novel, and sends it off to a publisher ...

Gotterdämmerung

Christopher Hitchens, 12 January 1995

... for more than twenty years and last January wrote a loopy letter to this journal, blaming James Fenton and myself for once queering his pitch at the New Statesman. ‘Effete onanist’ was one of the things he said about me. About himself he wrote with even more feeling: ‘In those days, I had no revolutionary ideology to sustain me, nothing but a ...

The Debate

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2024

... vetting, a successor who would embody ‘MAGA: The Next Generation’. JD Vance, formerly known as James Donald Bowman, James David Hamel and J.D. Vance, now strangely rebranded without the stops, is a self-styled ‘hillbilly’ whose backwoods was Middletown, Ohio, an industrial suburb of Cincinnati (pop. 50,987), where he ...

Diary

Zachary Leader: Oscar Talk at the Huntington, 16 April 1998

... Sonia Levien (1880-1960), whose papers the Huntington owns. Levien was a story editor at Fox, MGM and Paramount, and her screenwriting credits include State Fair (1933), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1940), Quo Vadis? (1951) and Interrupted Melody (1955), for which she won the Academy Award. The Library also possesses the papers of Catherine ...

Guinea Pigs

Barbara Taylor: Eighteenth-Century Surveillance Culture, 8 February 2007

The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s 
by John Barrell.
Oxford, 278 pp., £53, January 2006, 0 19 928120 3
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... Anglican right-wingers also turned their fire on aristocratic ‘friends of liberty’. Charles Fox and his cronies, with their flagrantly libertine lifestyles, were easy targets, made easier for Pittite loyalists by their own hero’s reputation for sexual purity. ‘Public men’ such as Fox and Pitt had always been ...

What else actually is there?

Jenny Turner: On Gillian Rose, 7 November 2024

Love’s Work 
by Gillian Rose.
Penguin, 112 pp., £9.99, March 2024, 978 0 241 94549 0
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Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory 
by Gillian Rose, edited by Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson.
Verso, 176 pp., £16.99, September 2024, 978 1 80429 011 8
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... can manage much better with the dead, for they are silent.’ Kierkegaard, in short, is a fox who easily outruns Hegel; Hegel a hedgehog who rolls into a ball. As thinkers they are entirely incompatible. Except that Rose completely disagrees.‘This work begins instead by exploring the diremption of law and ethics as it appears not between but within ...

Honourable Chains

Alice Hunt: Catherine of Braganza, 9 July 2026

Queen Catherine’s Court: Power and Rebellion in Restoration England 
by Sophie Shorland.
Atlantic, 332 pp., £11.45, June 2025, 978 1 83895 641 7
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Later Stuart Queens, 1660-1735: Religion, Political Culture and Patronage 
edited by Eilish Gregory and Michael C. Questier.
Macmillan, 368 pp., £119.99, January 2025, 978 3 031 38815 6
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The Material World of a Restoration Queen Consort: The Privy Purse Accounts of Catherine of Braganza 
edited by Maria Hayward.
Boydell and Brewer, 540 pp., £59.99, November 2024, 978 1 910653 14 2
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... from Nell Gwyn to Louise de Kérouaille. She was kind to Charles’s first illegitimate son, James Crofts, duke of Monmouth – just 13 in 1662 – and would later plead (unsuccessfully) for his life after he tried to topple his Catholic uncle, James II, in 1685. Catherine found allies in women like herself: the young ...

Our Slaves Are Black

Nicholas Guyatt: Theories of Slavery, 4 October 2007

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World 
by David Brion Davis.
Oxford, 440 pp., £17.99, May 2006, 0 19 514073 7
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The Trader, the Owner, the Slave 
by James Walvin.
Cape, 297 pp., £17.99, March 2007, 978 0 224 06144 5
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The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 
by Colin Kidd.
Cambridge, 309 pp., £16.99, September 2006, 0 521 79324 6
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The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview 
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese.
Cambridge, 828 pp., £18.99, December 2005, 0 521 85065 7
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... action is harder to fathom, especially in the more autonomous societies of the British Atlantic. James Walvin’s new book takes a different approach. In an effort to get away from the ‘big meta-narrative’, Walvin presents biographical sketches of three participants in Britain’s 18th-century slave economy. John Newton (1725-1807) was a slave captain ...

The Club and the Mob

James Meek: The Shock of the News, 6 December 2018

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now 
by Alan Rusbridger.
Canongate, 464 pp., £20, September 2018, 978 1 78689 093 1
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... you’d watch once, at a regular hour (even as late as 1997, CNN and Sky News were quite niche; Fox News had just started up, and the BBC’s 24-hour news channel launched that autumn). After the network news, there would be the local TV bulletin. Some evenings, there were news specials, longer shows like CBS’s 60 Minutes, ITV’s World in Action or the ...