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Prophet of the Past

Oliver Cussen: Blame it on Malthus, 26 September 2024

The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History 
by Deborah Valenze.
Yale, 254 pp., £45, July 2023, 978 0 300 24613 1
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... he warned. ‘The wave of population will break upon that shore, and roll back upon itself.’ John Maynard Keynes, who made no secret of his admiration for Malthus, attributed the First World War and the Russian Revolution to overpopulation and global competition for food. The ‘great acceleration’ of the second half of the 20th century, a period of ...

Eden without the Serpent

Eric Foner, 11 December 1997

A History of the American People 
by Paul Johnson.
Weidenfeld, 925 pp., £25, October 1997, 0 297 81569 5
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... democracy it was all the more difficult to abolish slavery, since ‘the persons who make the laws in that country are persons who have slaves themselves.’The very ‘freedom of the free’, Smith pointed out, helped to produce ‘the great oppression of the slaves’. Johnson succumbs to another kind of oversimplification when he attempts to read ...

Take a Cold Bath

Lucy Wooding: Chastity or Fornication?, 6 March 2025

Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity 
by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Allen Lane, 660 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 241 40093 7
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... never said a word against same-sex relationships was disappointing to those attempting to write laws against sodomy in the Middle Ages; their ingenious solution was to spread the story that all the sodomites in the world died at the Nativity, since the Christ child couldn’t possibly have been born into a world that contained so much sin. This unlovely ...

Vendlerising

John Kerrigan, 2 April 1987

The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry 
edited by Helen Vendler.
Faber, 440 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 571 13945 0
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Selected Poems 
by John Ashbery.
Carcanet, 348 pp., £16.95, April 1986, 0 85635 666 2
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The Poetry Book Society Anthology 1986/87 
edited by Jonathan Barker.
Hutchinson, 94 pp., £4.95, November 1986, 0 09 165961 2
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Two Horse Wagon Going By 
by Christopher Middleton.
Carcanet, 143 pp., £5.95, October 1986, 0 85635 661 1
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... dis/continuity constrained and enabled authors as well as anthologists. By subduing themselves to laws governing, e.g., tai and yu (‘essence’ and ‘attribute’) and the arrangement of loaded words (‘pine’, ‘rose’, ‘late cherry blossom’), renga poets such as Basho developed skills inseparable from compilation. What held between poems became ...

Manners maketh books

E.S. Turner, 20 August 1981

Debrett’s Etiquette and Modern Manners 
edited by Elsie Burch Donald.
Debrett, 400 pp., £8.95, June 1981, 0 905649 43 5
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... in Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process, and doubtless elsewhere). Two centuries ago, when John Debrett became a miscellaneous publisher, his contemporary advice-givers had moved on to new fields; for example, offering a tip or two to a young lady newly ravaged by smallpox on how to hold on to her lover, with complementary advice to a gallant robbed of ...

Ozick’s No

John Lanchester, 4 February 1988

The Messiah of Stockholm 
by Cynthia Ozick.
Deutsch, 144 pp., £9.95, November 1987, 9780233981420
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The Birds of the Innocent Wood 
by Deirdre Madden.
Faber, 147 pp., £9.95, January 1988, 0 571 14880 8
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The Coast of Bohemia 
by Zdena Tomin.
Century, 201 pp., £11.95, October 1987, 0 09 168490 0
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... the story moves in a deeply satisfying trajectory – a trajectory described according to the laws of four-dimensional geometry, perhaps. This sense of moving in accord with an unfamiliar logic is what Ozick shares with Bruno Schulz. Schulz was one of the strangest writers who ever lived, but the stories in his two books (all of which take place in a ...

Lumpers v. Splitters

Lorraine Daston: The Weather Watchers, 3 November 2005

Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology 
by Katharine Anderson.
Chicago, 331 pp., £31.50, July 2005, 0 226 01968 3
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... daily basis and send them to London to be tabulated and – somehow – synthesised to reveal the laws of the air. John Locke was one of scores of weather-watchers who interleaved their observations with entries in journals and commonplace book jottings. The diurnal rhythms of most of an adult life could be set by the ...

Making Media Great Again

Peter Geoghegan, 6 March 2025

... childhood in West London, Merchant Taylors’ School, history and modern languages at St John’s College, Oxford, then an MBA at Insead. In 1997 he and Ian Wace launched the hedge fund Marshall Wace, with $50 million of seed capital raised from friends, family and George Soros. It now manages $69 billion in assets. Like many hedge fund ...

They could have picked...

Eliot Weinberger, 28 July 2016

... us would think that a beheading is a far greater threat than a sunburn.’ They could have picked John Kasich, a former Congressman and Fox News host, currently governor of Ohio. Known throughout his career as a phlegmatic and abusive man, widely disliked in Congress, he underwent an image makeover for the presidential campaign. He became, in his own words, a ...

See you in court, pal

John Lanchester: The Microsoft Trial, 30 September 1999

The Nudist on the Late Shift 
by Po Bronson.
Secker, 248 pp., £10, August 1999, 0 436 20477 0
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Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane 
by Michael Malone.
Aurum, 598 pp., £18.99, April 1999, 1 85410 638 4
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Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet 
by Michael Woolf.
Orion, 364 pp., £7.99, June 1999, 0 7528 2606 9
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The Cathedral and the Bazaar: revised edition 
by Eric S. Raymond.
O'Reilly, 256 pp., £11.95, February 2001, 0 596 00108 8
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... become the world’s first trillionaire. That means he will be worth a thousand billionaires. As John Allen Paulos demonstrated in his book Innumeracy, most of us have a poor grasp of what numbers on this scale mean; so take a second to guess, intuitively, what you think the difference in time is between a million seconds and a billion seconds. Ready? A ...

Living and Dying in Ireland

Sean O’Faolain, 6 August 1981

... that this lethal practice flourished here in pre-Christian times derives from the ancient Irish Laws which recognised and strove to regulate the rite of ‘fasting against a person of exalted state in order to enforce a claim against him’. This elegantly succinct definition I take from the long essay entitled ‘Irish History and Irish Law’ by Dr Daniel ...

Factory of the Revolution

Blair Worden: Quentin Skinner, 5 February 1998

Liberty before Liberalism 
by Quentin Skinner.
Cambridge, 137 pp., £19.99, November 1997, 0 521 63206 4
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... moment was perhaps the publication, while Skinner was an undergraduate, of a scholarly edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government by Peter Laslett. Laslett showed how radically Locke’s text had been misunderstood because of the ignorance of political scientists about, and their indifference to, the circumstances and aims of its ...

Who digs the mines?

Andrew Liu: Chinese Exclusion, 21 July 2022

The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics 
by Mae Ngai.
Norton, 440 pp., £21.99, September 2021, 978 0 393 63416 7
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... in San Francisco published a pamphlet taking issue with claims made by California’s governor, John Bigler, who had characterised the state’s 7520 Chinese migrants as servile ‘coolies’ undercutting white workers. ‘The poor Chinaman does not come here as a slave,’ Tong Achick and Chun Aching wrote in An Analysis of the Chinese Question. ‘He ...

Carved into the Flesh

Barbara Newman: Medieval Bodies, 11 October 2018

Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages 
by Jack Hartnell.
Wellcome, 346 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 1 78125 679 4
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... the head inspires discussions of mental illness, hairstyles, beheading, and the rival relics of John the Baptist’s head. Under the rubric of skin, Hartnell ad-dresses flaying, leprosy, plastic surgery, racial difference and manuscripts – for, as others have pointed out, most of what we know about the premodern past is written on the skins of dead ...

The Art of Stealth

Bruce Ackerman: The Supreme Court under Threat, 17 February 2005

... neo-conservative of the 1980s, but his successors may well go far beyond him, striking down laws protecting workers and the environment, supporting the destruction of basic civil liberties in the war on terrorism, and engaging in a wholesale attack on the premises of 20th-century constitutionalism. Or then again, Bush may hesitate. Despite his professed ...

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