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Toe-Lining

Frank Kermode, 22 January 1998

Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics and the Translation of Empire 
by Heather James.
Cambridge, 283 pp., £37.50, December 1997, 0 521 59223 2
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... It will also ‘legitimate the cultural place of the theatre in late Elizabethan and early Stuart London’. On the first page it is argued that the entrance of Lavinia, in Titus Andronicus, with ‘her hands cut off and her tongue cut out and ravished’, is Ovidian and Petrarchan in tone (the latter because the way her injuries are described is said ...

Forget the Klingons

James Hamilton-Paterson: Is there anybody out there?, 6 March 2003

Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life 
by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart.
Ebury, 369 pp., £17.99, September 2002, 0 09 187927 2
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XTL: Extraterrestrial Life and How to Find It 
by Simon Goodwin and John Gribbin.
Weidenfeld, 191 pp., £12.99, August 2002, 1 84188 193 7
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... in which life-forms might not replicate according to natural selection. But they do quote Stuart Kauffman’s definition, according to which a life-form is any ‘autonomous agent’ that can reproduce and carry out at least one thermodynamic work cycle. In other words, it would have to be able to redirect energy so as to ‘pump up’ processes back ...

Europe, what Europe?

Colin Kidd: J.G.A. Pocock, 6 November 2008

The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 344 pp., £18.99, September 2005, 9780521616454
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Barbarism and Religion. Vol. III: The First Decline and Fall 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 527 pp., £19.99, October 2005, 0 521 67233 3
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Barbarism and Religion. Vol. IV: Barbarians, Savages and Empires 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £17.99, February 2008, 978 0 521 72101 1
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... or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, Pocock had begun to explore the archipelagic dimensions of Stuart history. However, geography is not a straightforward determinant of history. Sometimes the geographical underpinnings of grand narratives are as much a human construct as the narratives themselves. This is one of the dominant themes of Pocock’s ...

Blame it on Darwin

Jonathan Rée, 5 October 2017

Charles Darwin, Victorian Mythmaker 
by A.N. Wilson.
John Murray, 438 pp., £25, September 2017, 978 1 4447 9488 5
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... by Means of Natural Selection. It was immediately recognised as a work of great importance: John Stuart Mill, for example, called it a ‘wonderful feat of scientific knowledge and ingenuity’ and ‘an unimpeachable example of a legitimate hypothesis’. It was also – like Voyage of the Beagle, only more so – an artful work of literature: perhaps the ...

Emvowelled

Thomas Keymer: Muddy Texts, 25 January 2024

Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early 18th-Century Literature 
by Abigail Williams.
Princeton, 328 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 0 691 17068 8
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... compete by dancing on ropes. In the published text, he changed the colours to purple, yellow and white; blue, red and green were the colours, respectively, of the Orders of the Garter, Bath and Thistle – coveted prizes in Robert Walpole’s repertoire of patronage and sleaze.This didn’t deter the hack who blustered that Swift’s intention ‘could be no ...

Jolly Jack and the Preacher

Patrick Parrinder, 20 April 1989

A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars 
by D.L. LeMahieu.
Oxford, 396 pp., £35, June 1988, 0 19 820137 0
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... of their time was spent attacking the other stall-holders. After Wordsworth, Carlyle, Newman, John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold spoke up for the liberal university and the higher journalism as natural bulwarks against the tide of commercialism. In LeMahieu’s eyes such figures stand convicted of a cultural élitism which stemmed from their-groundless ...

Misunderstandings

J.H. Burns, 20 March 1986

Henry Brougham 1778-1868: His Public Career 
by Robert Stewart.
Bodley Head, 406 pp., £18, January 1986, 0 370 30271 0
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Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The ‘Edinburgh Review’ 1802-1832 
by Biancamaria Fontana.
Cambridge, 256 pp., £22.50, December 1985, 0 521 30335 4
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... bitterness which his by then distant political activities had so frequently generated. As with the white cobra in Kipling’s ‘The King’s Ankus’, the fangs had long been harmless, the poison-sacs dried up. Yet Brougham had been a terror and a torment in his time. To Lord Sefton he was ‘the Archfiend’; Lady Grey, in a shrewder assessment, identified ...

The View from the Top

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Upland Anarchists, 2 December 2010

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland South-East Asia 
by James C. Scott.
Yale, 442 pp., £16.99, January 2011, 978 0 300 16917 1
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... in the early chapters of the book. At one point, he proposes a mental experiment involving a white map with altitudes marked on it in high relief and ‘each rice-growing core’ with ‘a reservoir of red paint filled to the very brim’. Tilting the map this way and that, and laying it flat again, the spread and concentration of the red ink would mark ...

Jailed, Failed, Forgotten

Dani Garavelli: Deaths in Custody, 20 February 2025

... brother grew up in a semi-detached house on the southern edge of Glasgow, with their parents, Stuart, a data analyst, and Linda, a nurse turned government adviser. One cold November evening, I sat with Linda in a shelter at the top of her garden looking out towards Ben Lomond. She told me about her daughter, who loved her friends, her golden ...

Against the Same-Old Same-Old

Seamus Perry: The Brownings, 3 November 2016

The Brownings’ Correspondence, Vol 21 
edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Joseph Phelan, Edward Hagan and Rhian Williams.
Wedgestone, 432 pp., $110, April 2014, 978 0 911459 38 8
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The Brownings’ Correspondence, Vol 22 
edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Joseph Phelan, Edward Hagan and Rhian Williams.
Wedgestone, 430 pp., $110, June 2015, 978 0 911459 39 5
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Robert Browning 
edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan.
Oxford, 904 pp., £95, December 2014, 978 0 19 959942 4
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Browning Studies: Being Select Papers by Members of the Browning Society 
edited by Edward Berdoe.
Routledge, 348 pp., £30, August 2015, 978 1 138 02488 5
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... monologue notionally addressed to a love-object, though her reality is pretty foggy. John Stuart Mill read the poem attentively in preparation for a review which never appeared, although Browning did later get to see his notes and was understandably struck by one of Mill’s sharper comments: ‘The writer seems to me possessed with a more intense and ...

The History Boy

Alan Bennett: Exam-taking, 3 June 2004

... and dressed up again. This time, though, nobody laughed as we were all dressed up, in the suit, white tie, mortar-board and gown that were obligatory for the occasion. This was, I suppose, the last and most significant examination in my life and it was in this examination that I cheated, just as I had cheated a few years before to get the scholarship that ...

Consider the lions

Peter Campbell, 22 July 1993

The House of Gold 
by Richard Goy.
Cambridge, 304 pp., £60, January 1993, 0 521 40513 0
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The Palace of the Sun 
by Robert Berger.
Pennsylvania State, 232 pp., £55, April 1993, 0 271 00847 4
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... There have been active designers – Classicists like Adam, Goths like Pugin, Hellenists like Stuart and Modernists like Venturi, as well as historians (Ruskin, Pevsner, Banham) – who have had opinions on the future as well as the past of architecture. The emulating eye may be self-serving and envious, but it is also challenging and competitive. Goy and ...

Mighty Merry

E.S. Turner, 25 May 1995

The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Eleven Volumes, including Companion and Index 
edited by R.C. Latham and W. Matthews.
HarperCollins, 267 pp., £8.99, February 1995, 0 00 499021 8
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... head and heart were held up to ‘shouts of joy’. Having witnessed this affirmation of Stuart power. Pepys went back to ‘my Lord’s’, collected two colleagues and bought them oysters at the Sun tavern. ‘After that I went by water home, where I was angry with my wife for her things lying about, and in my passion kicked the little fine Baskett ...

Genetic Mountaineering

Adrian Woolfson: The evolution of evolvability, 6 February 2003

A New Kind of Science 
by Stephen Wolfram.
Wolfram Media, 1197 pp., £40, May 2002, 1 57955 008 8
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... natural selection, the programmed order of genes and the non-programmed ‘order for free’, as Stuart Kauffman has called it, generated within certain types of complex system. Historical contingency, too, has a role in the new synthesis. Simon Conway Morris has argued that if the Earth hadn’t been hit by the meteorite that probably made the dinosaurs ...

Gentlemen’s Spleen

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen: Hysterical Men, 27 August 2009

Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness 
by Mark Micale.
Harvard, 366 pp., £19.95, December 2008, 978 0 674 03166 1
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... of the 19th, and in the ‘creative illnesses’ of young intellectuals such as David Hume, John Stuart Mill – or Sigmund Freud. In fact, all these men suffered from hysteria: that is, if we subscribe to Micale’s line of reasoning, from an unacceptable femininity that the body of masculine medicine could only ‘repress’ and ‘exclude’ by projecting ...

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