Triermain Eliminate

Chauncey Loomis, 9 July 1987

Native Stones: A Book about Climbing 
by David Craig.
Secker, 213 pp., £10.95, May 1987, 0 436 11350 3
Show More
Show More
... fulfilled and terminated. That cured me for good. So now I admire climbing from a distance. As David Craig effectively demonstrates in Native Stones, however, it is an activity best understood from close up. Much of its delight and terror is almost microscopic in source. Non-climbers may associate the sport with acrophobic spaces, alp on alp arising, but ...

Really Good at Killing

Thomas Nagel: The Ethics of Drones, 3 March 2016

Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President and the Rise of the Drone 
by Scott Shane.
Bantam, 416 pp., £20, September 2015, 978 0 8041 4029 4
Show More
Show More
... Watch among others, on multiple grounds: 1) that those targeted may not be combatants under the laws of war; 2) that the intelligence used to identify and locate targets is often unreliable; 3) that the concept of an ‘imminent threat’ used as the basis for lethal action has been grossly distorted, beyond the bounds of legitimate self-defence; 4) that ...

AmeriKKKa

Thomas Sugrue: Civil Rights v. Black Power, 5 October 2006

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice 
by Raymond Arsenault.
Oxford, 690 pp., £19.99, March 2006, 0 19 513674 8
Show More
Show More
... Alabama boycotted the city’s public transport system after Rosa Parks defied Jim Crow laws by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Leading the protests was Martin Luther King. In the aftermath of the Montgomery bus boycott, King established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, using black churches as the base for organising ...

Man as the Measure

David Pears, 18 August 1983

Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition 
by Saul Kripke.
Blackwell, 150 pp., £9.50, September 1982, 0 631 13077 2
Show More
Show More
... to the world and this puts them under a constraint to yield true predictions and intelligible laws. Now Wittgenstein hardly alludes to this constraint in Philosophical Investigations. Almost all his remarks are concerned with the learning and subsequent use of language in the give and take of social life. There is no doubt that this is the main source of ...

Diary

Eyal Weizman: Three Genocides, 25 April 2024

... the ‘intertemporal principle’ holds that a legal question must be assessed on the basis of the laws in effect at the time the act was committed. Germany argued that since the UN Convention on Genocide only came into force in 1948 it couldn’t be applied to the genocide in South-West Africa. A similar argument was presented by Eichmann at his trial in ...

Shockingly Worldly

David Runciman: The Abbé Sieyès, 23 October 2003

Emmanuel Sieyès: Political Writings 
edited by Michael Sonenscher.
Hackett, 256 pp., $34.95, September 2003, 0 87220 430 8
Show More
Show More
... to move men, money and votes upwards to the centre, and to organise the administration of national laws that came back down. They were to be, Sieyès wrote later, ‘more than confederated states; they are true, integral and essential parts of one and the same whole. This observation is important so that one never compares us with the United States of ...

Public Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre, 18 February 1982

Explaining America: The ‘Federalist’ 
by Garry Wills.
Athlone, 286 pp., £14.50, August 1981, 0 485 30003 6
Show More
James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition 
by David Hoeveler.
Princeton, 374 pp., £13.70, June 1981, 0 691 04670 0
Show More
Show More
... in 1793, he declared that if what he had advocated was treasonable, then Plato, Harrington and David Hume were equally guilty. To the present-day student of Hume, Muir’s inclusion of him in his catalogue of reformers must appear even odder than his appeal to Plato: for Hume is usually and rightly portrayed as a consistent defender of the 18th-century ...

Out of the Pound Loney

Ronan Bennett: The demonising of Gerry Adams, 5 March 1998

Man of War, Man of Peace? The Unauthorised Biography of Gerry Adams 
by David Sharrock and Mark Devenport.
Macmillan, 488 pp., £16.99, November 1997, 0 333 69883 5
Show More
Show More
... To judge from this biography, the Sinn Féin leader still has some way to go. According to David Sharrock and Mark Devenport, Adams is a ruthless, scheming hypocrite who talks peace in front of the cameras, but in private continues to plot death and misery. He speaks of ‘inclusion’ and publicly condemns sectarianism, but has boasted that he would ...

Copyright

John Sutherland, 2 October 1980

Copyright: Intellectual Property in the Information Age 
by Edward Ploman and L. Clark Hamilton.
Routledge, 248 pp., £12.50, September 1980, 0 7100 0539 3
Show More
Show More
... is Paramount Pictures Corporation, who are the work’s legal author. The noveliser is David Seltzer. Corporate authorship and versatile commercial exploitation are more systematic in the case of Star Wars. The film originated with George Lucas, credited on the title page with authorship of the novelisation (subsequent adventures of Luke Skywalker ...

Non-Stick Nationalists

Colin Kidd: Scotland’s Law, 24 September 2015

Constitutional Law of Scotland 
by Alan Page.
W. Green, 334 pp., £95, June 2015, 978 0 414 01456 5
Show More
Show More
... decision the Scottish government established a group of experts under the chairmanship of Sir David Edward to examine the UK Supreme Court’s jurisdiction in Scottish criminal appeals. The experts favoured continuation of the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. Irritated, the SNP set up a further review group under the chairmanship of Lord ...

Spin Foam

Michael Redhead: Quantum Gravity, 23 May 2002

Three Roads to Quantum Gravity: A New Understanding of Space, Time and the Universe 
by Lee Smolin.
Phoenix, 231 pp., £6.99, August 2001, 0 7538 1261 4
Show More
Show More
... a few names of those he calls ‘the true heroes of [his] story’, such as Alain Connes and David Finkelstein. The fact is that the third road is not yet sufficiently well trodden to lend itself to popular exposition. If there are no points in space-time, what does this imply about the nature of time in quantum gravity? To some, including Julian Barbour ...

That Disturbing Devil

Ferdinand Mount: Land Ownership, 8 May 2014

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership 
by Andro Linklater.
Bloomsbury, 482 pp., £20, January 2014, 978 1 4088 1574 8
Show More
Show More
... dispose thereof, of every part thereof in fee simple or otherwise, according to the order of the laws of England’. That raffish, bisexual gallant, Raleigh’s half-brother, was to control the freehold of the Eastern Seaboard all the way up to Newfoundland, anywhere which was not already occupied by ‘any Christian prince or people’ (no look-in for ...

Eye-Popping

Ian Jackman: Killer SUVs, 7 October 2004

High and Mighty: SUVs, the World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way 
by Keith Bradsher.
PublicAffairs, 464 pp., $14, December 2003, 1 58648 203 3
Show More
Show More
... agreed. Light trucks were exempted first from the Clean Air Act and subsequently from gas-guzzler laws, bumper-height, brake and stability regulations, and any number of crash-test strictures. SUV sales have also been buttressed by a tax on imported trucks that had its origins in a trade dispute over frozen chickens; by a tax loophole that allows many SUV ...

The Pocahontas Exception

Thomas Laqueur: America’s Ancestor Obsession, 30 March 2023

A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in US History 
by Francesca Morgan.
North Carolina, 301 pp., £27.95, October 2021, 978 1 4696 6478 1
Show More
Show More
... has a telos: the fulfilment of the prophecy that the Messiah would be a descendant of the House of David. This precludes the pyrotechnic genealogical loops of the pagan gods, but it also illustrates the problem of genealogy more generally. Where to start and who to include? The Gospel of Luke takes the lineal patriarchal story back to Adam, which makes us all ...

Vuvuzelas Unite

Andy Beckett: The Trade Union Bill, 22 October 2015

Trade Union Bill (HC Bill 58) 
Stationery Office, 32 pp., July 2015Show More
Trade Union Membership 2014: Statistical Bulletin 
Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 56 pp., June 2015Show More
Show More
... in the Falklands War earlier that year. The unions’ postwar heyday was already over. Further laws followed in 1984, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1992. Often euphemistically called Employment Acts, the new laws first restricted or ended the unions’ most expansive powers: the closed shop, which made union membership ...