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Weird Things in the Sky

Edmund Gordon: Are we alone?, 26 December 2024

After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon 
by Greg Eghigian.
Oxford, 388 pp., £22.99, September 2024, 978 0 19 086987 8
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... had started receiving letters from witnesses after writing about UFOs for the Village Voice, and David Jacobs, a historian at Temple University who had written the first academic monograph on the subject. Believing that abductions were now at epidemic level, part of a sinister intergalactic breeding programme, Hopkins and Jacobs treated their subjects as ...

Stuck in Chicago

Linda Colley, 12 November 1987

Women 
by Naim Attallah.
Quartet, 1165 pp., £15, October 1987, 0 7043 2625 6
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... As I write this, the Liberal MP David Alton is about to introduce a Bill changing the upper time limit on legal abortions from 28 weeks to 18. If he succeeds, more women will be forced to give birth against their will, and more will be obliged to give birth to children already known to be severely handicapped. Whether he succeeds will be determined by a House of Commons where 13 out of every 16 MPs belong to the sex that does not get pregnant and does not, traditionally, take on the main responsibility of childcare ...

A Billion Years a Week

John Ziman, 19 September 1985

Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age 
by David Bolter and A.J. Ayer.
Duckworth, 264 pp., £12.95, October 1984, 0 7156 1917 9
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... to be processed”. I call those who accept this view of man and nature Turing’s men.’ David Bolter is a Classical scholar although he has a degree in computer science. He writes engagingly, encompassing the sweep of history right back to the Greeks. Computer technology is a curious combination of ancient and Western European technical ...

Through the Mill

Jane Humphries: The Industrial Revolution, 20 March 2014

Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution 
by Emma Griffin.
Yale, 303 pp., £12.99, March 2014, 978 0 300 20525 1
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... to illustrate various aspects of working-class life in Useful Toil and Destiny Obscure. By 1981, David Vincent had found 142 memoirs spanning the years from 1790 to 1850, and in Bread, Knowledge and Freedom used them to explore the response of ordinary people to economic and social change. In 1989, Vincent, Burnett and ...

A Pound Here, a Pound There

David Runciman, 21 August 2014

... and its eclectic membership included the philosopher Bernard Williams, the sports commentator David Coleman and the agony aunt Marje Proops. The report they produced two years later was measured, intelligent, elegantly written, slightly agonised and almost wholly ineffectual. The Rothschild Commission accepted that the law on gambling in Britain remained ...

The Superhuman Upgrade

Steven Shapin: The Book That Explains It All, 13 July 2017

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow 
by Yuval Noah Harari.
Vintage, 528 pp., £9.99, March 2017, 978 1 78470 393 6
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... from recent prods to produce work of greater scope. In The History Manifesto (2014), Jo Guldi and David Armitage worry that the production of scholarly miniatures disqualifies historians from contributing to urgent cultural and political discussions – about climate change, sustainable production, international governance etc – in which the longue durée ...

Too Big to Shut Down

Chal Ravens: Rave On, 7 March 2024

Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain 
by Ed Gillett.
Picador, 464 pp., £20, August 2023, 978 1 5290 7064 4
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... about raves that had to be stopped? Breaking into warehouses was illegal, but there were already laws for that. Ecstasy had been banned in the UK since 1977. And it couldn’t simply have been the power of the sound systems or the youth of the partygoers. Less than a month after Castlemorton, a huge licensed event called Fantazia was celebrated in the Daily ...

Swiftly Encircling Gloom

Tim Radford, 8 May 1997

Promising The Earth 
by Robert Lamb.
Routledge, 204 pp., £35, September 1996, 0 415 14443 4
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... The moment was late in 1970, at the Travellers’ Club in London, during a supper for 14 people. David Brower, the saint of eco-sanity from the Sierra Club in California, had just given a sermon, a hell-fire variant of the one geologists have used for a century or more: rocks are long, life is short, who do we think we are? Brower’s homily – which the ...

A couple of peep-holes in the pillowcase and off we go a-lynching

Ian Hamilton: The Ku Klux Klan, 30 September 1999

Inside the Klavern: The Secret History of the Ku Klux Klan of the Twenties 
by David Horowitz.
Southern Illinois, 191 pp., £39.95, July 1999, 0 8093 2247 1
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... and similar clean-up operations. And then, all of a sudden, the whole thing fell apart. New state laws against secret societies, together with one or two well-publicised cases of corruption, seemed to be the cause. Really, though, by 1930 Americans had grown tired of being clean. By this date, they were also broke. Being clean and broke was pretty ...

Founding Moments

Stuart Macintyre, 11 March 1993

The Oxford History of Australia. Vol. II, 1770-1860: Possessions 
by Jan Kociumbas.
Oxford, 397 pp., £25, September 1992, 0 19 554610 5
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The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony: Law and Power in Early New South Wales 
by David Neal.
Cambridge, 266 pp., £30, March 1992, 9780521372640
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Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838, George Gipps and the British Conquest of New South Wales 
by Roger Milliss.
McPhee Gribble, 965 pp., February 1992, 0 86914 156 2
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Living in a New Country: History, Travelling and Language 
by Paul Carter.
Faber, 214 pp., £14.99, July 1992, 0 571 16329 7
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... and family life, on which the settlement’s ‘blueprint for growth’ was premised. By contrast, David Neal’s monograph opens with a successful legal action brought by a convict couple against one of the First Fleet captains. Neal is concerned to show how the establishment of the rule of law in a penal colony, at once a tautology and an oxymoron, created ...

On and off the page

Thomas Nagel, 25 July 1991

Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration 
by Edna Margalit and Avishai Margalit.
Hogarth, 224 pp., £25, June 1991, 0 7012 0925 9
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... had no sympathy for Marx’s conviction that violent conflict was the inevitable expression of the laws of history. In an essay called ‘Isaiah’s Marx, and Mine’ that begins with engaging personal reminiscence and goes on to careful exegetical argument, G.A. Cohen recounts his experience as a student of Berlin’s, and then takes issue with his view of ...

Prize Poems

Donald Davie, 1 July 1982

Arvon Foundation Poetry Competion: 1980 Anthology 
by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.
Kilnhurst Publishing Company, 173 pp., £3, April 1982, 9780950807805
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Burn this 
by Tom Disch.
Hutchinson, 63 pp., £7.50, April 1982, 0 09 146960 0
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... Paul Coltman, Richard Dankleff, Robin Ivy, Pete Morgan (two), Phyllis Koestenbaum, Barbara Moore, David MacSweeney (one out of two), Randall Garrison, Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and Robert Ballard, Isabel Nathaniel and Peter Didsbury, Anthony Edkins and Brian ...

Uncrownable King and Queen

Christopher Sykes, 7 February 1980

The Windsor Story 
by J. Bryan and Charles Murphy.
Granada, 602 pp., £8.95, November 1980, 0 246 11323 5
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... with the Duke when he was Prince. The authors seem indifferent to the perils of the libel laws and in consequence write with refreshing if unchivalrous candour, but unfortunately with much literary ignorance. They confuse two very different masters – Lewis Carroll with Edward Lear – and ascribe that ridiculous but famous play What Every Woman ...

Making a start

Frank Kermode, 11 June 1992

Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel 
by A.D. Nuttall.
Oxford, 264 pp., £30, April 1992, 0 19 811741 8
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... Tristram Shandy, himself opening his remarks on that novel with a very apt citation from Plato’s Laws, to the effect that people should be sure not to be drunk or disordered when copulating, lest their offspring be physically or mentally impaired: for ‘the beginning, like a god,’ says Plato, ‘preserves all.’ Sterne’s is described as ‘the most ...

Iceland Sinks

Haukur Már Helgason: The Icelandic Crisis, 20 November 2008

... million came in only last Friday!’ Easy come, easy go. When the boss of the central bank, David Oddsson, and the finance minister, Arni Mathiesen, declared after nationalising Icesave that Iceland would not pay these debts – or, in Mathiesen’s version, might perhaps settle some part of them – the UK applied its anti-terrorist ...

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