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Ripe for Conversion

Paul Strohm: Chaucers’s voices, 11 July 2002

Pagans, Tartars, Muslims and Jews in Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ 
by Brenda Deen Schildgen.
Florida, 184 pp., £55.50, October 2001, 0 8130 2107 3
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... are interdependent, saming is more characteristic of the medieval encounter with the unfamiliar or unknown. Its face is the more friendly and generous of the two, especially in the admirably benign Chaucer; but this is not to say that it is less telling, or less oppressive, in its final effects. One of the great ‘samers’ of the later Middle Ages was the ...

A Poke of Sweeties

Andrew O’Hagan: Neal Ascherson’s Magnificent Novel, 30 November 2017

The Death of the ‘Fronsac’ 
by Neal Ascherson.
Apollo, 393 pp., £18.99, August 2017, 978 1 78669 437 9
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... of known quantities, but the novel asks for something else, something native and essential but unknown. Many fiction-writers, despite what they say, betray a little romance about the question of belonging, as they surely must, otherwise, like the opinion-writer, they will merely know the price of everything and the value of nothing. There may also be, in ...

Their Way

Jose Harris: On the Origin of Altruism, 12 March 2009

The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain 
by Thomas Dixon.
British Academy, 420 pp., £60, May 2008, 978 0 19 726426 3
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... in the public culture of Europe in the early 21st century. Yet the name of Auguste Comte is unknown to countless people whose daily lives and mental outlook are widely shaped or impinged on by his principles. It was not always thus. Much recent research on the history of social reform and ‘planning’ movements in Britain and Europe before, during and ...

In the Cave

Peter Campbell: Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 28 April 2011

... An unknown number of years ago a rockfall closed the entrance to a cave in the limestone gorge of the Ardèche river in France. In 1994 three speleologists found air wafting from an opening, cleared a way in and discovered caves and grottos running 400 metres or so into the rock. The walls are lined with drawings of animal species – bison, lions, bears, horses, aurochs, deer and rhinoceroses ...

Lapse

Jorie Graham, 22 March 2012

... resumes, and your mind is again in your hard grip on the chains which had been until then as if unknown to your body during what might have been the interglacial lull, or the period during which the original ooze grew single-cell organisms, which grew small claws and feet and then had to have eyes, till your hands become again hard, heavy, and all the ...

In Cambridge

Peter Campbell: The Cambridge Illuminations: Ten Centuries of Book Production in the Medieval West, 18 August 2005

... wrong word order). It was, the exhibition catalogue suggests, ‘written at speed to meet some unknown deadline’.* The script, on the other hand, is masterly: fluent, rhythmical and regular. The swift, even script of the History has a modern urgency. It is exhibited beside a Pontifical – a book listing the ceremonies only a bishop can perform – that ...

At the British Museum

Jeremy Harding: The African Galleries, 10 May 2001

... who underwrote John Hawkins’s second slaving-voyage along the coasts of Africa in 1564 is by an unknown artist ...

Fourteen Thousand Dried Penguins

Patrick O’Brian, 9 November 1989

Last Voyages. Cavendish, Hudson, Ralegh: The Original Narratives 
edited by Philip Edwards.
Oxford, 268 pp., £25, November 1988, 0 19 812894 0
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The Nagle Journal: A Diary for the Life of Jacob Nagle, Sailor, from the Year 1775 to 1841 
edited by John Dann.
Weidenfeld, 402 pp., £18.95, March 1989, 1 55584 223 2
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Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741-1742 
by Georg Wilhelm Steller, edited by O.W. Frost, translated by Margritt Engel and O.W. Frost.
Stanford, 252 pp., $35, September 1988, 0 8047 1446 0
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... Steller discovered Rhytina stelleri (now also called Hydromalis gigas), a huge sea-going mammal unknown to the learned world and indeed to mankind in general. Georg Wilhelm Steller was one of those many Germans who came to Russia from the time of Peter the Great onwards to help modernise the empire and explore its resources. He had studied theology, botany ...

Dislocations

Stephen Fender, 19 January 1989

Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The world turned upside down 
by Robert Lawson-Peebles.
Cambridge, 384 pp., £35, March 1988, 0 521 34647 9
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Mark Twain’s Letters. Vol. I: 1853-1866 
edited by Edgar Marquess Branch, Michael Frank and Kenneth Sanderson.
California, 616 pp., $35, May 1988, 0 520 03668 9
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A Writer’s America: Landscape in Literature 
by Alfred Kazin.
Thames and Hudson, 240 pp., £15.95, September 1988, 0 500 01424 8
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... pick up the latest information on the natural sciences before undertaking his exploration of the unknown territory, and although the expedition was to be equipped with recently-invented equipment, including a new kind of airgun and packets of friction matches, developed expressly for this occasion, Lewis’s education in landscape description was to be less ...

The Unhappy Vicar

Samuel Hynes, 24 January 1980

Orwell: The Transformation 
by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams.
Constable, 240 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 0 09 462250 7
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... have added another myth to those already wrapped round Orwell. In their previous book, The Unknown Orwell, and again in Orwell: The Transformation, they postulate two characters who inhabit in sequence the same body: first Eric Blair (Orwell’s real name), and then, by a process of enlightenment and political commitment, George Orwell. This separation ...

Against Self-Criticism

Adam Phillips, 5 March 2015

... which he tells us something about suicide, and something about death, and something about all the unknown and unknowable future experiences that death represents. And he does this by telling us something about conscience. Or rather, two things about conscience. The first quarto of Hamlet has, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,’ while the second ...

Boundaries

Martin Jay, 10 June 1993

Notes to Liteature: Vols I-II 
by Theodor Adorno, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Shierry Weber.
Columbia, 284 pp., $35, June 1992, 9780231069120
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... messages in bottles tossed into the ‘flood of barbarism bursting on Europe’ for the benefit of unknown future readers. The floodwaters have now mercifully receded, and the bottles sporadically wash up on foreign shores, thanks to intrepid translators taking on the challenge of Adorno’s idiosyncratic prose. The first to make him accessible to an ...

Days of Reckoning

Orlando Figes, 7 July 1988

Stalin: Man and Ruler 
by Robert McNeal.
Macmillan, 389 pp., £16.95, June 1988, 0 333 37351 0
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... questioned how far Stalin was able, in practice, to exercise such autocratic powers. Fitzpatrick (unknown to McNeal) has depicted a Communist Party responding to changing social forces. The growing impatience of younger Communists – those who had grown up in the revolutionary period – with the slow pace of change during the late Twenties fuelled the ...

Thought-Quenching

Thomas Jones: Q and China Miéville, 7 January 1999

Deadmeat 
by Q..
Sceptre, 256 pp., £6.99, May 1997, 0 340 68558 1
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King Rat 
by China Miéville.
Macmillan, 333 pp., £9.99, November 1998, 0 333 73881 0
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... her mystique on a London estate; the discomforting street justice administered by Clarkie on an unknown woman for an unknown crime; Uncle Oscar’s account of a fight in the factory canteen: Ah look down, an si mi breakfas dat ah pay mi big two pounds fah, scatta hall ova di table. Den ah ot burnin feelin ina mi groin ...

The Light Waters of Amnion

Dan Jacobson: Bruno Schulz, 1 July 1999

The Collected Works of Bruno Schulz 
edited by Jerzy Ficowski.
Picador, 582 pp., £50, December 1998, 0 330 34783 7
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... lengthy lectures on the nature of matter (‘Lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life’); he also assumes the attributes of a cockroach, a fox (‘in permanent contact with the unseen world of mouseholes, dark corners, chimney vents and dusty spaces under the floor’) and an astronomer who uses the chimney-piece to discover ...

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