Everywhere and Nowhere

Lorraine Daston: Climate Proxies, 7 May 2026

Climate by Proxy: A History of Scientific Reconstructions of the Past and the Future 
by Melissa Charenko.
Chicago, 248 pp., £28, November 2025, 978 0 226 84410 7
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... in the weather tended to be smoothed out. In the short run, contingency mattered, as did bouts of savage weather. But in the long run, climate and geography dominated. Melissa Charenko’s book tracks what happened to climate science when new technologies vastly extended its chronological reach. In the mid-19th century, long-held assumptions about climate ...

China’s Crisis

Mark Elvin, 5 November 1992

The Dragon’s Brood: Conversations with Young Chinese 
by David Rice.
HarperCollins, 294 pp., £16.99, April 1992, 0 246 13809 2
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Time for telling truth is running out 
by Vera Schwarcz.
Yale, 256 pp., £20, April 1992, 0 300 05009 7
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The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China’s Crisis 
by W.F.J. Jenner.
Allen Lane, 255 pp., £18.99, March 1992, 0 7139 9060 0
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Beyond the Chinese Face: Insights from Psychology 
by Michael Harris Bond.
Oxford, 125 pp., £8.95, February 1992, 0 19 585116 1
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Chinese Communism 
by Dick Wilson and Matthew Grenier.
Paladin, 190 pp., £5.99, May 1992, 9780586090244
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... was amiss, though differing as to what) in the later 19th century. It crystallised in the savage indictment of the Chinese past and the Chinese character in Liang Qichao’s Theory of a New Citizenry in the first years of the present century. What is Jenner’s diagnosis? First, that the inherited historical vision of ‘China’ is a psychological ...

How Much Is Too Much?

Benjamin Kunkel: Marx’s Return, 3 February 2011

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism 
by David Harvey.
Profile, 296 pp., £14.99, April 2010, 978 1 84668 308 4
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A Companion to Marx’s ‘Capital’ 
by David Harvey.
Verso, 368 pp., £10.99, March 2010, 978 1 84467 359 9
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... David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi’s Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual quakes of capitalist crisis. Yet little trace of this literature, by Marx or his successors, has surfaced even among the more open-minded ...

Unpranked Lyre

John Mullan: The Laziness of Thomas Gray, 13 December 2001

Thomas Gray: A Life 
by Robert Mack.
Yale, 718 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 300 08499 4
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... of syntax and the personification of abstract ideas (another of Wordsworth’s special hates). Robert Mack, properly enough, sets out to be Gray’s advocate and though not all his vindications of individual poems are persuasive, his biography does add an important consideration to our understanding of Gray’s poetic values, and therefore of his high ...

Wriggling, Wriggling

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Ruthless Cecil Rhodes, 23 October 2025

The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes 
by William Kelleher Storey.
Oxford, 528 pp., £30.99, July, 978 0 19 981135 9
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... killing white children. What looked like ruthlessness was ‘vision’ – as savage Africa was bound to fall to civilised powers, Rhodes was right to urge that it would benefit not just the settlers but Africans to make as much of it British as possible. Even Schreiner had initially been taken with such grand ambitions: on her return to ...

Via Mandela

R.W. Johnson, 5 January 1989

Higher than Hope: ‘Rolihlahla we love you’ 
by Fatima Meer.
Skotaville, 328 pp., R 15, July 1988, 0 947009 59 0
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... responded by becoming a complete tomboy and a wilful, troublesome child, which in turn led to savage beatings. Finally, her mother died having the boy she had longed for and Winnie had to nurse this killer man-child. The terrible scars of this childhood doubtless do much to explain Winnie’s impulsive and ‘difficult’ temperament. She decided to ...

Just like Mother

Theo Tait: Richard Yates, 6 February 2003

Collected Stories 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 474 pp., £17.99, January 2002, 0 413 77125 3
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Revolutionary Road 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 346 pp., £6.99, February 2001, 0 413 75710 2
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The Easter Parade 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 226 pp., £10, January 2003, 0 413 77202 0
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... in Hollywood, but none of his scripts was ever produced. He worked as a speech-writer for Robert Kennedy, a career cut short by JFK’s assassination. Recently, there has been a considerable resurgence of interest in his writing, previously limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael ...

Diary

Mark Ford: Love and Theft, 2 December 2004

... some time after Laurence Sterne’s death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from Robert Burton’s attack on literary imitators in his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. ‘As apothecaries,’ Burton observed, ‘we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another … Again, we weave the same web still, twist the same ...

Neutered Valentines

David Bromwich: James Agee, 7 September 2006

‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, ‘A Death in the Family’, Shorter Fiction 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 818 pp., $35, October 2005, 1 931082 81 2
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Film Writing and Selected Journalism 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 748 pp., $40, October 2005, 1 931082 82 0
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Brooklyn Is 
by James Agee.
Fordham, 64 pp., $16.95, October 2005, 0 8232 2492 9
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... things he wished he could do – ‘a dozen Chekhov-Shakespeare novels’, as one of his editors, Robert Phelps, summarised a characteristic resolution; a life of Jesus; a novel about the atom bomb – were to become an almost public constituent of his writing life. His criticism is marked by the same mixture of yearning and disappointed hopes. Agee’s ...

Mrs Thatcher’s Instincts

Barbara Wootton, 7 August 1980

Mrs Thatcher’s First Year 
by Hugh Stephenson.
Jill Norman, 128 pp., £6.50, June 1980, 0 906908 16 7
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A House Divided 
by David Steel.
Weidenfeld, 200 pp., £6.50, June 1980, 0 297 77764 5
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... they had learned half of it. No more largesse for the rich or even for the middle-income groups! Savage cuts in almost all public services except defence, together with reductions in the real value of short-term social security benefits, such as sick pay and unemployment benefit, became the order of the day – in defiance of the other half of the lesson ...

Where have all the horses gone?

Eric Banks: Horse Power, 5 July 2018

The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey through Human History 
by Susanna Forrest.
Atlantic, 418 pp., £9.99, October 2017, 978 0 85789 900 2
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Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relationship 
by Ulrich Raulff, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp.
Penguin, 448 pp., £9.99, February 2018, 978 0 14 198317 2
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... the most cosmopolitan writers of the time: one thinks of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Robert Louis Stevenson. Every single great idea that fuelled the driving force of the 19th century – freedom, human greatness, compassion, but also the subcurrents of history uncovered by contemporaries, such as the libido, the unconscious and the uncanny ...

Not Altogether Lost

James Hamilton-Paterson: The Tasaday, 19 June 2003

Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday 
by Robin Hemley.
Farrar, Straus, 352 pp., $25, May 2003, 0 374 17716 3
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... anthropology is precisely this interrelatedness. The sentimental figure of the ecologically noble savage, to which Hemley admits being attracted, has long ceased to interest. The exact degree of the Tasaday’s ‘lostness’ was always a confounding issue. As early as 1971, experienced anthropologists such as Robert Fox ...

One Stock and Nation

Christopher Kelly: Roman Britain, 11 February 2010

The Recovery of Roman Britain 1586-1906: A Colony so Fertile 
by Richard Hingley.
Oxford, 389 pp., £83, June 2008, 978 0 19 923702 9
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... It was Roman intervention that had ensured ‘the society of civill life’ and ‘chased away all savage barbarisme from the Britans minds’. The result was the creation of a new identity. ‘And meet it is we should beleeve, that the Britans and Romans in so many ages, by a blessed and joyfull mutuall ingrafting, as it were, have growen into one stocke and ...

Nothing for Ever and Ever

Frank Kermode: Housman’s Pleasures, 5 July 2007

The Letters of A.E. Housman 
edited by Archie Burnett.
Oxford, 1228 pp., £180, March 2007, 978 0 19 818496 6
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... attempt to persuade others that Manilius was worth their trouble. ‘I adjure you,’ he wrote to Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, ‘not to waste your time on Manilius. He writes on astronomy and astrology without knowing either.’ To an American correspondent he wrote: ‘I do not send you a copy, as it would shock you very much; it is so dull that few ...

Bransonism

Paul Davis: Networking in 18th-century London, 17 March 2005

Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector 1685-1750 
by Christine Gerrard.
Oxford, 267 pp., £50, August 2003, 0 19 818388 7
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... critic John Dennis, John Dyer (the author of the loco-descriptive smash-hit Grongar Hill), Richard Savage, Nahum Tate (the Poet Laureate) and Edward Young (Night Thoughts). For a while, early in his career, Hill acted as secretary to Lord Peterborough, the future honorary Scriblerian; he was also later distantly linked with Bolingbroke, to whom he addressed ...