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Dangerous Chimera

Colin Kidd: What is liberty?, 8 May 2025

Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal 
by Quentin Skinner.
Cambridge, 320 pp., £35, January, 978 1 107 02773 2
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... emphasised the natural rights of the people to remove a tyrant who would reduce them to servitude. John Locke, whose work was not immediately influential but had by the 1740s become a vital prop of the Whig regime, upheld the classical definition of liberty as independence. The work of Algernon Sidney, another Whig icon, who was executed by Charles II in ...

Mere Party

Robert Stewart, 22 January 1987

Pillars of Government, and Other Essays on State and Society c.1770-c.1880 
by Norman Gash.
Arnold, 202 pp., £25, June 1986, 0 7131 6463 8
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Sir Robert Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 
by Norman Gash.
Longman, 745 pp., £12.50, July 1986, 0 582 49722 1
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... historian. His notions of history-writing may not accommodate the wilder ambitions of Whigs like John Morley, who said that ‘the history of England ought to end with something that might be called a moral,’ or Professor Seeley, whose Expansion of England, invigorating though it is, gave ample proof that he really believed that ‘history fades into mere ...

Draining the Whig bathwater

Conrad Russell, 10 June 1993

The Personal Rule of Charles I 
by Kevin Sharpe.
Yale, 983 pp., £40, November 1992, 0 300 05688 5
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... because they say so. It is difficult to believe that ‘Justice Finch’s claim that the forest laws were implemented “without the least distaste or disaffection or complaint or clamour of his people”, and the King’s own expressed belief that the forest laws were for the benefit of his subjects as well as himself ...

Photo-Finish

John Hedley Brooke, 23 May 1985

Just Before the Origin: Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Evolution 
by John Langdon Brooks.
Columbia, 284 pp., $39, January 1984, 0 231 05676 1
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China and Charles Darwin 
by James Reeve Pusey.
Harvard, 544 pp., £21.25, February 1984, 0 674 11735 2
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... else would. And we all know that, in a photo-finish, Wallace almost did; or, if we are to believe John Langdon Brooks, really did. If philosophers have been attracted to these historical sites, it is partly because the pattern of simultaneous discovery might seem to substantiate a relatively uncomplicated, inductivist account of scientific innovation. Once ...

Tocqueville anticipated me

Katrina Forrester: Karl Popper, 26 April 2012

After ‘The Open Society’: Selected Social and Political Writings 
by Karl Popper, edited by Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner.
Routledge, 493 pp., £16.99, August 2011, 978 0 415 61023 0
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... 2011, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that George Soros had violated insider trading laws more than two decades ago in dealings with the French bank Société Générale. Soros has given billions of his personal wealth to fund liberal political organisations, notably his own Open Society Foundations, which operate on a global scale and have ...

Binarisms

John Sutherland, 18 November 1993

Complicity 
by Iain Banks.
Little, Brown, 313 pp., £15.99, September 1993, 0 316 90688 3
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Against a Dark Background 
by Iain M. Banks.
Orbit, 496 pp., £8.99, January 1994, 1 85723 185 6
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... its contrived shocks than the way in which the novel constantly makes as if to flout the libel laws of 1993 as comprehensively as The Wasp Factory flouted 1984 taboos on child torture. James Anderton is not, like ‘Judge Jamieson’ or ‘Sir Toby Bissett’, an easily penetrable pseudonym, but the name of a real bogeyman of the Left. One turns the pages ...

Landau and his School

John Ziman, 18 December 1980

Landau: A Great Physicist and Teacher 
by Anna Livanova, translated by J.B. Sykes.
Pergamon, 226 pp., £10, June 1980, 0 00 000002 7
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... his papers, as if, somehow, everything followed naturally and inevitably from the basic physical laws. This apparently intuitive approach concealed a deep understanding of the mathematical inwardness of the situation, which few other physicists could adequately grasp. What we all admired about his scientific work was its unity – of mathematical formulae ...

A Billion Years a Week

John Ziman, 19 September 1985

Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age 
by David Bolter and A.J. Ayer.
Duckworth, 264 pp., £12.95, October 1984, 0 7156 1917 9
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... approximations sharpened into exact formulae, and statistical associations ruled to be rigorous laws. In that respect, a computer model of an aspect of nature is not different in principle from any general hypothetical proposition, to be manipulated and tested for its implications. The scientist who sets up a computer simulation to explore the implications ...

Bohr v. Einstein

John Barrow, 20 August 1992

Niels Bohr’s Times, in Physics, Philosophy and Polity 
by Abraham Pais.
Oxford, 656 pp., £25, October 1991, 0 19 852049 2
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... revealed the true depths of meaning within the inner space of the atom and its nucleus. There are laws governing these worlds which prevent us from learning of their state with ever-improving accuracy. No matter how perfect our instruments of observation, there exists an irreducible uncertainty in our simultaneous determination of certain ...

The Journalistic Exemption

Jo Glanville: GDPR and Journalism, 5 July 2018

... that used his services. In March this year, the self-confessed blagger turned whistleblower John Ford revealed the tactics he had used over a period of 15 years up to 2010 to obtain information illegally for newspapers; on one occasion he impersonated William Hague on the phone to get access to his bank account. Many believe that such malpractice ...

Room for the Lambs

Elizabeth Spelman: Sexual equality, 26 January 2006

Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws 
by Catharine MacKinnon.
Harvard, 558 pp., £25.95, March 2005, 0 674 01540 1
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... sexual harassment, rape and other forms of physical violence. Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws offers reminders of what she thinks sexual equality would look like and how she thinks the law might come to share in the creation of such equality despite having spread its protective arms around sexual inequality for so very long. What would it be for men ...

How to die

John Sutherland, 13 February 1992

Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying 
by Derek Humphry.
Hemlock Society, 192 pp., $16.95, April 1991, 0 9606030 3 4
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... her kill herself. He agreed, but only on condition that she come to Michigan, a State where the laws on euthanasia are vaguer than anywhere else in America. Kevorkian was not prepared to risk being thrown out of his apartment by using it for business. Mrs Adkins was consequently hooked up to his suicide machine in his rusting 1968 van, parked in a local ...

Diary

John Lanchester: A Whiff of Tear Gas, 19 December 2019

... is called Central. The mass transit railway is called the Mass Transit Railway. The basic set of laws governing the territory is called the Basic Law. The person who runs the territory is called the chief executive.) Near our old block of flats, I can stand in a place which once looked down over shanties and look up at skyscrapers rising higher than my ...

Taking Sides

John Mullan: On the high road with Bonnie Prince Charlie, 22 January 2004

The ’45: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Untold Story of the Jacobite Rising 
by Christopher Duffy.
Cassell, 639 pp., £20, March 2003, 0 304 35525 9
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Samuel Johnson in Historical Context 
edited by J.C.D. Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill.
Palgrave, 336 pp., £55, December 2001, 0 333 80447 3
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... the armies are the Jacobite Highlanders and the Hanoverian forces under Lieutenant General Sir John Cope. Duffy is giving a fair signal of the minute military history to come and a display of what he does best: the careful explanation of tactics (and tactical errors); the arrangement of eyewitness accounts; the painstaking analysis of the effects of ...

May I come to your house to philosophise?

John Barrell: Godwin’s Letters, 8 September 2011

The Letters of William Godwin Vol. I: 1778-97 
by Pamela Clemit.
Oxford, 306 pp., £100, February 2011, 978 0 19 956261 9
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... darkest period of his mourning. The volume includes letters to Joseph Priestley, Thomas Lawrence, John Thelwall, Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as ...

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