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A Laugh a Year

Jonathan Beckman: The Smile, 18 June 2015

The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris 
by Colin Jones.
Oxford, 231 pp., £22.99, September 2014, 978 0 19 871581 8
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... authorities had cast a shadow of disapproval over its diminutive, the smile (le sourire). Aristotle may have noted that laughing distinguished mankind from the rest of the animal kingdom, but that didn’t mean it was to be encouraged. ‘The passion of Laughter is nothyng but a suddaine Glory arising from the suddaine Conception of some Eminency in ...

What architects said before they said ‘space’

Andrew Saint: The vocabulary of modern architecture, 30 November 2000

Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture 
by Adrian Forty.
Thames and Hudson, 335 pp., £28, April 2000, 0 500 34172 9
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... techniques. Architects owe more to the legacy of Demosthenes and Cicero than to that of Plato and Aristotle, and perhaps that should be recognised in their schools. Out they go onto the stage, dancing and playing with words and distorting them, yet applauded by us because we hope that it will help them refashion the old mixture of beauty, utility and firmness ...

‘Drown her in the Avon’

Colin Kidd: Catharine Macaulay’s Radicalism, 7 September 2023

Catharine Macaulay: Political Writings 
edited by Max Skjönsberg.
Cambridge, 312 pp., £24.99, March, 978 1 009 30744 4
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... an all too canonical discipline – in which a phalanx of political philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Marx and Mill engaged in a common pursuit across the centuries – gave way to the insight that political philosophers, just as much as hack pamphleteers, were often responding to immediate issues. Contextualism moved political thought in an ...

I am a false alarm

Robert Irwin: Khalil Gibran, 3 September 1998

Kahlil Gibran: Man and Poet 
by Suheil Bushrui and Joe Jenkins.
One World, 372 pp., £18.99, August 1998, 1 85168 177 9
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Prophet: The Life and Times of Kahlil Gibran 
by Robin Waterfield.
Allen Lane, 366 pp., £20, August 1998, 0 7139 9209 3
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... but Ouspensky was not a ‘drooper’ and the Tertium Organum (a successor to the Organums of Aristotle and Bacon) sets out its case with a hectoring kind of pseudo-scientific rigour that is fun to read.Ouspensky’s exciting ideas get watered down in Gibran’s wool-gathering meditations. The main thing which Gibran got from Tertium Organum was the idea ...

Wired for Sound

Daniel Dennett, 23 June 1994

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language 
by Steven Pinker.
Allen Lane, 493 pp., £20, April 1994, 0 7139 9099 6
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Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature 
by Ray Jackendoff.
Harvester, 256 pp., £11.95, October 1993, 9780745009629
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... strangely stumbling) attempts at analysis by such early masters of self-consciousness as Plato and Aristotle. What was a word? How could meaning reside in a sound? Why are some sequences of words better than others, and how many dimensions of comparison are there? Some utterances are false but beautiful, others are true but ugly or boring, and still others are ...

Feast of St Thomas

Frank Kermode, 29 September 1988

Eliot’s New Life 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Oxford, 356 pp., £15, September 1988, 0 19 811727 2
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The Letters of T.S. Eliot 
edited by Valerie Eliot.
Faber, 618 pp., £25, September 1988, 0 571 13621 4
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The Poetics of Impersonality 
by Maud Ellmann.
Harvester, 207 pp., £32.50, January 1988, 0 7108 0463 6
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T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism 
by Richard Shusterman.
Duckworth, 236 pp., £19.95, February 1988, 0 7156 2187 4
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‘The Men of 1914’: T.S. Eliot and Early Modernism 
by Erik Svarny.
Open University, 268 pp., £30, September 1988, 0 335 09019 2
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Eliot, Joyce and Company 
by Stanley Sultan.
Oxford, 326 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 19 504880 6
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The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot 
by Robert Crawford.
Oxford, 251 pp., £25, December 1987, 9780198128694
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T.S. Eliot: The Poems 
by Martin Scofield.
Cambridge, 264 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 521 30147 5
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... political implications. But one ought to reflect that among the poet’s preferred models are Aristotle and Dante, Pascal and Baudelaire; impersonality and intelligence, as he understood them, are the achievement of heroic personalities, and it is hard to see that they necessarily imply political wickedness. What Eliot himself says about the topic in ...

As Astonishing as Elvis

Jenny Turner: Ayn Rand, 1 December 2005

Ayn Rand 
by Jeff Britting.
Duckworth, 155 pp., £12.99, February 2005, 0 7156 3269 8
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... to America because she agreed with its ‘moral premises’. Her only philosophical debt is to Aristotle; her only other acknowledgment is to the ‘values of character’ she finds in her husband, Frank. Then come ten pages of information about Objectivism, with bibliographies and a full-page advertisement – FIND or start a campus club near you ENTER ...

Bonkers about Boys

James Davidson: Alexander the Great, 1 November 2001

Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction 
edited by A.B. Bosworth and E.J. Baynham.
Oxford, 370 pp., £35, September 2000, 0 19 815287 6
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... to appear on the shelves. There was an official expedition historian, Callisthenes, a pupil of Aristotle, who was enough of a sycophant to claim the sea made obeisance to Alexander as he passed, but was not sycophantic enough to make the same gesture himself. He never finished his history, but was stoned to death – or placed under arrest until he died of ...

Pocock’s Positions

Blair Worden, 4 November 1993

Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain 
edited by Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner.
Cambridge, 444 pp., £35, March 1993, 9780521392426
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... freedom (or religion) at home. Then, too, there was the republicans’ preoccupation with Aristotle and their respect for his principle of distributive justice, which awards supreme power to supremely endowed individuals. Again we think of Milton, who suppressed his republican scruples and supported the Protectorate of ‘Cromwell, our chief of ...

Ultra-Sophisticated

Hilary Mantel, 7 December 1989

Life Lines: Politics and Health 1986-1988 
by Edwina Currie.
Sidgwick, 291 pp., £13.95, November 1989, 0 283 99920 9
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My Turn 
by Nancy Reagan and William Novak.
Weidenfeld, 384 pp., £15.95, October 1989, 0 297 79677 1
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Heiress: The Story of Christina Onassis 
by Nigel Dempster.
Weidenfeld, 180 pp., £12.95, October 1989, 0 297 79671 2
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... clinging, quixotically generous – emerges as an angel when one compares her with her father Aristotle, whose manipulative and potentially murderous hand lay heavy on her life. Her sycophants would have ruined her, except that the Onassis shipping empire provided her with an income of a million dollars a week; the polo-players and interior decorators ...

Out of this World

David Armitage, 16 November 1995

Utopia 
by Thomas More, edited by George Logan, Robert M. Adams and Clarence Miller.
Cambridge, 290 pp., £55, February 1995, 0 521 40318 9
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Utopias of the British Enlightenment 
edited by Gregory Claeys.
Cambridge, 305 pp., £35, July 1994, 0 521 43084 4
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... would have recognised it immediately as a work of moral philosophy, in a tradition stretching from Aristotle to Cicero and beyond. Most modern editions drop the full title, as they abandon its humanistic apparatus of dedicatory epistles and pointed marginalia. This may give the book a kind of accessibility but it obscures the work’s origins in a movement ...

Whose Greece?

Martin Bernal, 12 December 1996

Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History 
by Mary Lefkowitz.
Basic Books, 222 pp., $24, February 1996, 0 465 09837 1
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Black Athena Revisited 
edited by Mary Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers.
North Carolina, 544 pp., £14.75, September 1996, 0 8078 2246 9
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... also see that these arguments were being supported by gross errors of fact, such as the idea that Aristotle had plundered the Egyptian library at Alexandria as a basis for his own writings, whereas the library had actually been founded by Macedonian Greeks at least thirty years after Aristotle’s death. One might wonder ...

Wu-wei

Jonathan Barnes, 24 July 1986

The World of Thought in Ancient China 
by Benjamin Schwartz.
Harvard, 490 pp., £23.50, January 1986, 0 674 96190 0
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... Confucius had some effect on their actions, and that the theories and arguments of such people as Aristotle and Mo-tzu should be construed as serious attempts to discover the truth. Are these views really unfashionable? Or rather, has anyone outside the madhouse ever denied such evident truths? Well, according to Schwartz, the attack has been sustained by ...

Genette

Stephen Bann, 2 October 1980

Narrative Discourse 
by Gérard Genette, translated by Jane Lewin.
Blackwell, 285 pp., £9.95, June 1980, 0 631 10981 1
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... showed himself to be more profoundly indebted to the tradition of classicist criticism ‘from Aristotle to La Harpe’. His critical approach could be seen, against this perspective, as the raising of precisely those questions which the classicists, imprisoned within the ideology of mimesis, were incapable of framing: questions which had nevertheless ...

Undecidables

Stuart Hampshire, 16 February 1984

Alan Turing: The Enigma 
by Andrew Hodges.
Burnett, 587 pp., £18, October 1983, 0 09 152130 0
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... living in the USA, Kurt Gödel. Gödel has been plausibly described as the greatest logician since Aristotle, because his incompleteness proof, formal and final, showed that any mathematical system of an interesting complexity must generate propositions which cannot be shown within the system to be true or shown to be false. The proof blocked the programme of ...

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