Modernity

Bernard Williams, 5 January 1989

Whose justice? Which rationality? 
by Alasdair MacIntyre.
Duckworth, 410 pp., £35, March 1988, 9780715621981
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... some conceptions insist on our asking whether it is fair that some people should enjoy markedly more advantages than others. Those ideas dispute the ground, not just in the journals but in politics, with the presently more successful notion that you are entitled to what you have got or can get, so long as you rightfully ...

Serious Dr Sonne

Philip Purser, 6 December 1990

The Play of the Eyes 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Ralph Manheim.
Deutsch, 329 pp., £14.95, August 1990, 0 233 98570 0
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Yellow Street 
by Veza Canetti, translated by Ian Mitchell.
Halban, 139 pp., £11.95, November 1990, 1 870015 36 3
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... so rigorously to every figure he encounters in The Play of the Eyes, affairs of the mind are far more important than those of either body or personality. One by one the literary heroes of these Viennese years are summoned up, re-examined and found wanting in essential seriousness. Wittgenstein attracts only a passing mention, identified as ‘a ...

‘Turbot, sir,’ said the waiter

E.S. Turner, 4 April 1991

After Hours with P.G. Wodehouse 
by Richard Usborne.
Hutchinson, 201 pp., £15.99, February 1991, 0 09 174712 0
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... inside forty seconds into one concerning the best method of preserving bacon fat.’ There is more than a touch of this creative restlessness in After Hours with P.G. Wodehouse. Readers of this journal may recall a Diary by Richard Usborne (LRB, 4 October 1984) in which a determined investigation into the origins of Wodehouse’s use of ‘exquisite ...

Political Anatomy

Christopher Lawrence, 3 April 1986

The Black and white Medicine Show: How doctors serve and fail their customers 
by Donald Gould.
Hamish Hamilton, 278 pp., £10.95, June 1985, 9780241115404
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... the medical profession of the Twenties and Thirties, was, ultimately, a melodramatic plea for a more scientific medical education. Paradoxically, the medical man who has produced the strongest case against his brothers has spurned the mantle of revolutionary. Thomas McKeown has long argued on epidemiological grounds that ...

Doctoring the past

Anne Summers, 24 September 1992

The Woman beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in 18th-Century Germany 
by Barbara Duden, translated by Thomas Dunlap.
Harvard, 241 pp., £19.95, September 1991, 0 674 95403 3
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The Nature of their Bodies: Women and their Doctors in Victorian Canada 
by Wendy Mitchinson.
Toronto, 474 pp., £40, August 1991, 0 8020 5901 5
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Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality, 1900-1950 
by Lesley Hall.
Polity, 218 pp., £35, May 1991, 0 7456 0741 1
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... medical terminology reifies as objective physical states and processes what are more properly seen as subjective intellectual constructs. And she wishes us to go further still and to ‘start from the assumption that the imagination and perceptions of a given period have the power to generate reality.’ The title of her book in the original ...

Diary

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

... I have no feeling one way or the other about such bidder’s country of origin. It seems to me no more incongruous that the Tate Gallery should have a large collection of Monets (say) than that Buffalo University should have a collection of Robert Graves manuscripts (say). I view with unconcern the drift of British manuscripts to America, where our language ...

Out of the Lock-Up

Michael Wood: Wallace Stevens, 2 April 1998

Collected Poetry and Prose 
by Wallace Stevens, edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson.
Library of America, 1032 pp., $35, October 1997, 1 883011 45 0
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... Hemingway in Key West; the most appropriate Stevens’s refusing to speak at a memorial for Dylan Thomas, whom he thought of as ‘an utterly improvident person’.Stevens, trained as a lawyer, worked for most of his life for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He was born in 1879, of Dutch-German descent, in Reading, Pennsylvania; attended ...

Kill the tuna can

Christopher Tayler: George Saunders, 8 June 2006

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil and In Persuasion Nation 
by George Saunders.
Bloomsbury, 358 pp., £10.99, June 2006, 0 7475 8221 1
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... he published his first short-story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. This was praised by Thomas Pynchon as well as Wolff, and since then Saunders has been about as successful as a scrupulous writer of offbeat stories can be. He has returned to the writing-school circuit as a teacher and collected numerous National Magazine and O. Henry Awards. Each ...

Never Seen a Violet

Dinah Birch: Victorian men and girls, 6 September 2001

Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman 
by Catherine Robson.
Princeton, 250 pp., £19.95, June 2001, 0 691 00422 6
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... both were clothed alike’. Only later, at the start of their formal education, did boys enter a more markedly masculine sphere – an experience finely dramatised in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The growing boy is removed from the inadequate female guidance of mother, sisters and nursery-maid, and socialised in the exclusively masculine institution of a public ...

Madame, vous fatiguez les singes

E.S. Turner: The Tower Menagerie, 24 July 2003

The Tower Menagerie: Being the Amazing True Story of the Royal Collection of Wild and Ferocious Beasts 
by Daniel Hahn.
Simon and Schuster, 260 pp., £15.99, March 2003, 0 7432 2081 1
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... bigger animal establishments. The Emperor Frederick had three private zoos, sometimes taking the more spectacular beasts on his travels; he also ran a training school for cheetahs. Even that, as Hahn tells us, was small stuff compared with the gigantic zoo with six hundred keepers maintained by Montezuma, the entire contents of which were eaten during a long ...

A Plumless Pudding

John Sutherland: The Great John Murray Archive Disaster, 18 March 2004

... took on the Macmillan and Longman business materials, which would have been unattractive to more obviously prestigious libraries, and by offering to take good care of them went on to acquire custody of archives from Chatto, Bodley Head, Secker, Cape, Allen and Unwin, Elkin Mathews, Heinemann Educational and Virago. It isn’t hard to see why the parent ...

What would Plato have done?

Christopher Krebs: Plutarch’s Lives, 29 June 2017

The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives 
by Plutarch, translated by Pamela Mensch.
Norton, 393 pp., £28, March 2017, 978 0 393 29282 4
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... grouped into biographies, on the one hand (almost fifty have come down to us)and, on the other, more than seventy miscellaneous essays, from ‘The Face in the Moon’ and ‘The Intelligence of Animals’ to ‘The Obsolescence of Oracles’, ‘Advice on Public Life’ and the ever helpful ‘On Praising Oneself Inoffensively’: ‘an uneven ...

Two Sharp Teeth

Philip Ball: Dracula Studies, 25 October 2018

Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote ‘Dracula’ 
by David J. Skal.
Norton, 672 pp., £15.99, October 2017, 978 1 63149 386 7
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The Cambridge Companion to ‘Dracula’ 
edited by Roger Luckhurst.
Cambridge, 219 pp., £17.99, November 2017, 978 1 316 60708 4
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The Vampire: A New History 
by Nick Groom.
Yale, 287 pp., £16.99, October 2018, 978 0 300 23223 3
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... It was the spectre of the age, aroused by Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871), which linked humans to more primitive forms of life. Darwin’s ideas were crudely recycled in the supposed hierarchy of races, with Northern European whites placed highest on the evolutionary tree, along with the belief that individuals could be ...

Making doorbells ring

David Trotter: Pushing Buttons, 22 November 2018

Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic and the Politics of Pushing 
by Rachel Plotnick.
MIT, 424 pp., £30, October 2018, 978 0 262 03823 2
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... machinery’ in operation from a distance served as a measure of ‘efficacy in office’. More recent presidents have had yet more vast machineries at their disposal. It’s no surprise, as Plotnick points out, that Donald Trump should so obviously relish the role of digital commander. In January this year, playing ...

In Her Green Necklace

Elisabeth R. O’Connell: Mummy Portraits, 23 October 2025

The Mysterious Fayum Portraits: Faces from Ancient Egypt 
by Euphrosyne Doxiadis.
Thames and Hudson, 248 pp., £40, October 2024, 978 0 500 02794 3
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... greater archaeological context: in the 1990s at Marina el-Alamein on the Mediterranean coast and, more recently, at er-Rubayat (ancient Philadelphia).Petrie’s finds from Hawara and Albert Gayet’s from Antinoöpolis both caused a sensation when they were exhibited, but the mummy portraits were not examined in great detail. For most of the following ...