Nicky, Willy and George

Christopher Clark: The Tsar, the Kaiser and the King, 22 October 2009

The Three Emperors: Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War One 
by Miranda Carter.
Fig Tree, 584 pp., £25, September 2009, 978 0 670 91556 9
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... the ‘crystal-hard egoism’ of the prince by relentlessly exposing him to his own inadequacies, may well have done more harm than good. As one of Nicky’s Russian cousins later put it, ‘the education that was given us atrophied our powers and limited our horizons.’ It would be unfair to blame the teachers alone. The parents, with the exception of ...

At the Met

Michael Hofmann: Beckmann in New York, 16 February 2017

... charmingly refers to as the ‘ubiquitous cigarette’ (recte, the inevitable cigarette: it may always be there, but it knows its place) looks shrunken to a bidi. ‘Quappi in Grey’ (1948) I take Beckmann to be one of the great painters of the 20th century, his life one of the great 20th-century artists’ lives, and his diaries, the Tagebücher ...

Just how fast?

Donald MacKenzie: High-Frequency Trading, 7 March 2019

... winnowed out the slower links, and now only three firms remain in the race. (A fourth competitor may be about to emerge: it seems a new network is being built by Scientel, a specialist telecommunications firm with origins in the nuclear power sector. Scientel is probably doing this for an undisclosed HFT client, but I haven’t been able to discover whether ...

Mommy-Daddy Time

Zoë Heller: Can parents have fun?, 5 June 2014

All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood 
by Jennifer Senior.
Virago, 308 pp., £13.99, March 2014, 978 0 349 00551 5
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... of French women, but she also suggests that another, equally helpful model for American mothers may be found closer to home – in American fathers: unencumbered by outsized cultural expectations about what does or doesn’t constitute good parenting, and free from cultural judgments over their participation in the workforce, good fathers tend to judge ...

If Goofy Could Talk

Frank Cioffi, 6 April 1995

When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals 
by Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy.
Cape, 268 pp., £14.99, September 1994, 0 224 03554 1
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The Hidden Life of Dogs 
by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.
Weidenfeld, 148 pp., £12.50, May 1994, 0 297 81461 3
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The Tribe of Tiger 
by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.
Weidenfeld, 240 pp., £12.99, October 1994, 0 297 81508 3
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... involves imputing a considerable degree of foresight to the cats involved. She thinks the female may cultivate the challenger just in case his challenge is successful, so that he may spare her kittens on the assumption that they might be his. But can we comfortably impute this inference to a cat? The thing that does most ...

Who’d want to be English?

Tom Shippey, 4 January 2024

Triumph and Illusion: The Hundred Years War V 
by Jonathan Sumption.
Faber, 977 pp., £35, August, 978 0 571 27457 4
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... from Philip IV, also in the female line, but now in the third generation. While the argument may have been relevant in the 1320s, when Philip IV’s last son died, it was meaningless by 1453, after more than a hundred years of war. By then it was obvious that no matter his heredity, a king of England couldn’t be king of France, precisely because he was ...

Pond of Gloop

Claire Hall: Anaximander’s Universe, 18 May 2023

Anaximander and the Nature of Science 
by Carlo Rovelli, translated by Marion Lignana Rosenberg.
Allen Lane, 209 pp., £16.99, February, 978 0 241 63504 9
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... the substance. Thales thought it was water. He recognised that living creatures require water, and may have made observations about evaporation and condensation. From this, he extrapolated that water was the necessary precondition not just for life, but for the whole cosmos. In his system the Earth floated on water: earthquakes could be explained by occasional ...

Can I not be both?

Lola Seaton: On A.K. Blakemore, 22 February 2024

The Glutton 
by A.K. Blakemore.
Granta, 336 pp., £14.99, September 2023, 978 1 78378 919 1
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... language I think in,’ and if such a thing exists, the opening sentences of her two novels may well be written in it. The Manningtree Witches begins: ‘A hill wet with brume of morning, one hawberry bush squalid with browning flowers.’ (You can imagine a line break after the comma separating those disconnected images.) The first paragraph of The ...

War Chariots

Tom Stevenson: On the US and Taiwan, 4 July 2024

... of an invasion in 2023. The news sometimes seems to provide support for their position. On 23 May, China began major military exercises around Taiwan that it described as ‘punishment’ for comments made by the new president in Taipei, Lai Ching-te, in his inauguration speech.Why must the war be over Taiwan, which since 1972 the US has officially ...

The Debate

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2024

... like Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. ‘Dumb as a rock’ and ‘low IQ’ – he may be the last person on earth who mentions IQ – had no traction, considering that the stars of MAGA include the congresswomen Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, with their ‘gazpacho police’ and California wildfires started by Rothschild space ...

Maths is second best

Claire Hall: Archimedes on the Beach, 19 February 2026

Archimedes: Fulcrum of Science 
by Nicholas Nicastro.
Reaktion, 192 pp., £15.99, September 2024, 978 1 78914 922 7
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... method can also help him solve it. He encourages Eratosthenes to try it, speculating that others may find exciting new mathematics with it. When Heiburg’s transcription was circulated, it seemed to confirm a feature of Archimedes’ work that had been suspected for some time: some of his abstruse theories, particularly those about centres of mass, ...

England’s Isaiah

Perry Anderson, 20 December 1990

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas 
by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy.
Murray, 276 pp., £18.95, October 1990, 9780719547898
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... a master,’ to ‘break his own will and oblige him to obey a generally valid will whereby each may be free’ – but can only find such a master among other men, who are also animals that need to be mastered in their turn. It is this problem, of the unruliness of the ruler, that occasions the comment Berlin has taken for his motto. Kant, however, is ...

To Die One’s Own Death

Jacqueline Rose, 19 November 2020

... Sophie’s death, three of Freud’s other children, Anna, Ernst and Mathilde, had fallen ill. In May that year his wife, Martha, after years of undernourishment as she tried to manage for the whole family through the war, went down with a case of ‘grippe-pneumonie’, with recurrent waves of high fever, from which she took two months to recover.Conditions ...

Suiting yourself

Peter Campbell, 27 July 1989

I Modi. The Sixteen Pleasures: An Erotic Album of Renaissance Italy 
by Lynne Lawner.
Northwestern, 132 pp., $35.95, February 1989, 0 8101 0803 8
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The Dress of the Venetians 1495-1525 
by Stella Mary Newton.
Scolar, 196 pp., £28.50, December 1988, 0 85967 735 4
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Fashion Drawings in ‘Vogue’: René Bouët-Willamez and Fashion Drawings in ‘Vogue’: Carl Erickson 
by William Parker.
Joseph, 128 pp., £14.95, March 1989, 0 86350 198 2
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Women and Fashion 
by Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton.
Quartet, 184 pp., £15, March 1989, 0 7043 2691 4
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... ones. But the detail is fascinating. The speed with which changes took place suggests that fashion may have a constant velocity. And animadversions on the dress of the young, on the importation of foreign styles, the extravagance of women and the death of decency, speedily follow change. The most recent example of sumptuary law in this country (Second World ...

Vitality

John Cannon, 10 May 1990

A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 
by Paul Langford.
Oxford, 803 pp., £25, September 1989, 0 19 822828 7
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Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734-1832 
by Frank O’Gorman.
Oxford, 445 pp., £40, August 1989, 0 19 820056 0
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... The decision to begin the volume in 1727, at the accession of George II, is not defended and may be questioned: it lands us slightly awkwardly after the Hanoverian succession and in the middle of Walpole’s long period in office. Ireland and Scotland are pushed into the background. The Black Hole of Calcutta, so fearful an event to previous ...