Stir and Bustle

David Trotter: Corridors, 19 December 2019

Corridors: Passages of Modernity 
by Roger Luckhurst.
Reaktion, 240 pp., £25, March 2019, 978 1 78914 053 8
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... scheming protagonist ventures along it in search of the room occupied by her husband’s nephew, Robert, who is hot on her (bigamous) trail. ‘She stopped and looked at the number on the door. The key was in the lock, and her hand dropped upon it as if unconsciously.’ She stands for a few moments trembling, ‘then a horrible expression came over her ...

What to do with the Kaiser?

Stephen Sedley: Charging the Kaiser, 11 October 2018

The Trial of the Kaiser 
by William A. Schabas.
Oxford, 432 pp., £24.99, October 2018, 978 0 19 883385 7
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... a triable indictment. The phrase had been copied by Wilson from a note by his secretary of state, Robert Lansing, who was against the whole idea of a trial, and was endorsed with minimal discussion by the three other members of the council. Wilson was well content. He had even managed to replace ‘principles’, in a phrase in the third paragraph of Article ...

You have a new memory

Hal Foster: Trevor Paglen, 11 October 2018

Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen 
by John P. Jacob and Luke Skrebowski.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, 252 pp., £45, July 2018, 978 1 911282 33 4
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Trevor Paglen 
by Lauren Cornell, Julia This Bryan-Wilson and Omar Kholeif.
Phaidon, 160 pp., £29.95, May 2018, 978 0 7148 7344 2
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... of his ‘experimental geography’ draws on the precedent of the ‘site-nonsite’ artwork of Robert Smithson in order to respond to Fredric Jameson’s call for a ‘cognitive mapping’ of advanced capitalism. In the process Paglen also suggests a model of photography that turns the influential account of Roland Barthes on its head: rather than the ...

Leave them weeping

Colin Grant: Frederick Douglass, 1 August 2019

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom 
by David Blight.
Simon and Schuster, 892 pp., £30, November 2018, 978 1 4165 9031 6
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... Eden. To the assertion recently made by John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, that Robert E. Lee was an ‘honourable man’, and the Civil War a gentlemen’s disagreement, Douglass would counter that the ‘bombastic laudation’ and the ‘nauseating flatteries’ of the ‘rebel chief’ cannot distract from the fact that Lee ‘was a ...

He’s Humbert, I’m Dolores

Emily Witt, 21 May 2020

My Dark Vanessa 
by Kate Elizabeth Russell.
Fourth Estate, 384 pp., £12.99, March 2020, 978 0 00 834224 1
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... on Walt Whitman and ‘the idea that people contain multitudes and contradictions’, and on Robert Frost – ‘The Road Not Taken’, according to Strane, ‘isn’t meant to be a celebration of going against the grain but rather an ironic performance about the futility of choice’. They read Edgar Allan Poe, who (Vanessa knows) married his ...

With Only Passing Reference to the Earth

James Hamilton-Paterson: The Martian Enterprise, 22 August 2002

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World 
by Oliver Morton.
Fourth Estate, 351 pp., £18.99, June 2002, 9781841156682
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... real. The Mars Society very nearly fell apart at its first convention over the frank opinions of Robert Zubrin, a scientist who in 1990 had come up with an ingenious engineering solution to the problems of getting people to Mars. The plan, which he called ‘Mars Direct’, was to deploy recycled space shuttle rockets to deliver equipment essential for the ...

Woolsorters’ Disease

Hugh Pennington: The history of anthrax, 29 November 2001

... ripe for resolution, often because the necessary laboratory techniques have just come on stream. Robert Koch’s choice of anthrax in 1873 is a brilliant instance of this. Thanks to anthrax, he founded bacteriology as a science and in little over a decade catapulted himself from the life of a rural doctor in a small town in Posen – a province of the Second ...

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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... On the morning of 30 April 1865, Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy, head of the British Meteorological Department, slit his throat. Because Fitzroy had been the captain of the Beagle, which several decades earlier had carried the young Charles Darwin around the world to conduct the research that eventually bore fruit in On the Origin of Species (1859), and because he was a devout evangelical, some historians have chalked up his suicide to guilt over his unwitting complicity in the genesis of a scientific theory he detested ...

Hooray Hen-Wees

John Christensen: Pinochet’s Millions, 6 October 2005

Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System 
by Raymond Baker.
Wiley, 438 pp., £16.99, September 2005, 0 471 64488 9
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... for a surprisingly long time, but when scandal finally came in 1996 – a currency trader called Robert Young, working in cahoots with Cantrade Bank, a Jersey subsidiary of the Swiss banking giant UBS, defrauded investors of $26 million – the Wall Street Journal concluded that Jersey was an offshore hazard ‘living off lax regulation and political ...

Terkinesque

Sheila Fitzpatrick: A Leninist version of Soviet history, 1 September 2005

The Soviet Century 
by Moshe Lewin, edited by Gregory Elliott.
Verso, 416 pp., £25, February 2005, 1 84467 016 3
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... Lewin’s account of Lenin’s and Stalin’s interactions is very different from the one given by Robert Service in his biographies, and to my mind less persuasive. As before, Lewin does not address the apparent contradiction between his moderate Lenin and the revolutionary Lenin who seized power half a decade earlier, nor does he address the new material on ...

Carousel

Michael Hofmann: Zagajewski’s Charm, 15 December 2005

Selected Poems 
by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh, Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry and C.K. Williams.
Faber, 173 pp., £12.99, October 2004, 0 571 22425 3
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A Defence of Ardour: Essays 
by Adam Zagajewski.
Farrar, Straus, 198 pp., $14, October 2005, 0 374 52988 4
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... she is also the translator of Wyslawa Szymborska – while Renata Gorczynski, who, with help from Robert Hass, translated Tremor, I like even more for her willingness to entertain eccentricity in diction and lineation.) The second threat is from sweetness. Here, it is interesting that in his essay ‘Against Poetry’ Zagajewski cites ‘Gombrowicz’s chief ...

Damnable Deficient

Colin Kidd: The American Revolution, 17 November 2005

1776: America and Britain at War 
by David McCullough.
Allen Lane, 386 pp., £25, June 2005, 0 7139 9863 6
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... subservience of 21st-century citizens to 18th-century political solutions, foremost among them Robert Dahl in his devastating audit of the American political system, How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (2002). Dahl’s attempt to stir Americans from their cultic attachment to the founders is more than matched, however, by the efforts of ...

Tarot Triumph

Edmund Leach, 4 September 1980

The Game of Tarot: from Ferrara to Salt Lake City 
by Michael Dummett.
Duckworth, 600 pp., £45, August 1980, 0 7156 1014 7
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Twelve Tarot Games 
by Michael Dummett.
Duckworth, 242 pp., £5.95, August 1980, 0 7156 1488 6
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... United States. It was a year of political disaster. Nixon became President; Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both assassinated. But for Dummett things were even worse at home. He was ‘deeply involved in work to combat that racism which has, over the past fifteen years, disfigured our national life and dishonoured our country’, and in 1967 the ...

Hallo Dad

Christopher Ricks, 2 October 1980

Mr Nicholas Sir Henry and Sons Daymare 
by Thomas Hinde.
Macmillan, 271 pp., £6.95, August 1980, 0 333 29539 0
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... lucid patience and justice, has done nothing better. To bring out three books on the same day, as Robert Lowell knew when he promulgated History, For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, is to ask for comparisons, indeed to cry out for them when some of the work is old, some new – and the more so when, as in Hinde’s case, each book costs the same to the ...

Witchcraft and the Inquisition

Robin Briggs, 18 June 1981

Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late 16th and Early 17th Centuries 
by D.P. Walker.
Scolar, 116 pp., £9.95, March 1981, 9780859676205
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The Witches’ Advocate 
by Gustav Henningsen.
Nevada, 607 pp., $24, November 1980, 0 87417 056 7
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... from the earlier study of the Marthe Brossier case and its 17th-century successors by Professor Robert Mandrou. In this context it is interesting to note that Charles Miron, Bishop of Angers, who exposed Marthe as a fraud with almost casual ease before she even reached Paris, was himself the son of Henri III’s premier médecin. Marescot’s report on the ...