Cause and Effect

A.J. Ayer, 15 October 1981

Hume and the Problem of Causation 
by Tom Beauchamp and Alexander Rosenberg.
Oxford, 327 pp., £15, August 1981, 0 19 520236 8
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The Science of Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith 
by Knud Haakonssen.
Cambridge, 240 pp., £17.50, September 1981, 0 521 23891 9
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... I can, why the insertion of the concept of temporal priority into that of causality is not, as Russell once said it was, a purely arbitrary stipulation. David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, which is usually judged to be his principal contribution to philosophy, though he himself preferred his later and more polished Enquiries Concerning Human ...
The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul 
edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett.
Harvester, 448 pp., £9.95, November 1981, 0 7108 0352 4
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... past, not of the yet-to-be-experienced future. It is the world of the past which constitutes what John Bowlby has called ‘the environment of adaptiveness’. And, as Alice discovered when she observed the croquet game in Wonderland, outside the environment of adaptiveness anything can happen. Examples abound, not merely in fantasies and ...

Bug-Affairs

Hugh Pennington: Bedbugs!, 6 January 2011

... started. In truth our understanding of how bedbugs get about has changed little since 1730, when John Southall published his Treatise of Buggs: By Shipping they were doubtless first brought to England, so are they now daily brought. This to me is apparent, because not one Sea-Port in England is free; whereas in Inland-Towns, Buggs are hardly known … If ...

At the Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh

Tom Crewe: Roger Fenton, 16 November 2017

... heat that had succeeded an iron winter: already in March, the month of Fenton’s arrival, William Russell of the Times was cursing the hand-knitted mittens still arriving in their thousands from worried mothers. The rising temperatures interfered disastrously with the chemicals, necessitating longer exposure times, cooking the nitrate, drying out the plates ...

Dictators on the Loose

Miles Taylor: Modelling Waterloo, 6 January 2005

Wellington’s Smallest Victory: The Duke, the Model Maker and the Secret of Waterloo 
by Peter Hofschröer.
Faber, 324 pp., £14.99, April 2004, 0 571 21768 0
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... arrival on the scene during the Crimean campaign of the Times’s correspondent, William Howard Russell, and the photographer Roger Fenton, the only alternative to accepting the official line was to go and see for yourself. Which is what many people did in 1815. As Hofschröer notes, by the time Siborne’s model went on show in 1838, most people already ...

Short Cuts

Aziz Huq: Gerrymandering, 23 October 2025

... a redistricting map that sews up the outcome of a congressional election. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that although the Supreme Court ‘does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering’, any court-mandated intervention in district maps would inevitably look partisan and impugn the court’s neutrality. In 2017, during arguments in a ...

Beware Bad Smells

Hugh Pennington: Florence Nightingale, 4 December 2008

Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend 
by Mark Bostridge.
Viking, 646 pp., £25, October 2008, 978 0 670 87411 8
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... enterprise has not failed to show itself in the most favourable light. Thus in the Crimea Uncle John has carried his railroads with him, and the locomotive is used there to wheel up shot, shell and other implements of war … from the camp in the Crimea, to the War Office in London, the Commander in Chief now reports direct the state of the siege every few ...

Self-Hugging

Andrew O’Hagan: A Paean to Boswell, 5 October 2000

Boswell's Presumptuous Task 
by Adam Sisman.
Hamish Hamilton, 352 pp., £17.99, November 2000, 0 241 13637 7
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James Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’: Research Edition: Vol. II 
edited by Bruce Redford and Elizabeth Goldring.
Edinburgh, 303 pp., £50, February 2000, 0 7486 0606 8
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Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author 
by Lawrence Lipking.
Harvard, 372 pp., £11.50, March 2000, 0 674 00198 2
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Dr Johnson's London 
by Liza Picard.
Weidenfeld, 362 pp., £20, July 2000, 0 297 84218 8
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... Novel without a Hero’ – when the single-minded Becky Sharp, high in a coach bound for Russell Square, flings a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary out of the window to land on the grass at the feet of her former teacher, a sworn disciple of the Great Lexicographer. ‘So much for the Dictionary,’ says Becky Sharp as the carriage pulls ...

Metropolitan Miscreants

Matthew Bevis: Victorian Bloomsbury, 4 July 2013

Victorian Bloomsbury 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Yale, 380 pp., £25, July 2012, 978 0 300 15447 4
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Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810-40: Cockney Adventures 
by Gregory Dart.
Cambridge, 297 pp., £55, July 2012, 978 1 107 02492 2
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... aren’t always distinguishable from those who proclaim the gospel of ‘The March of Mind’. John Elliotson, a professor at the University of London, wanted to improve the practice of medicine, but thought this could be done partly by the use of mesmerism, and was exposed in the Lancet as a fraud – or possibly a dupe – in 1838. The high-minded ...

Battle of the Wasps

C.K. Stead: Eliot v. Mansfield, 3 March 2011

... raises questions about the relationship between these two and their spouses, Vivien Haigh-Wood and John Middleton Murry.* Why was Eliot distrustful, and even apprehensive, of Mansfield? What was Murry’s relationship with Vivien – and indeed with Eliot himself? Why were Vivien’s feelings about Murry so tortured – and was Mansfield jealous of her? There ...

Boys will be soldiers

Brian Harrison, 20 October 1983

Sure and Stedfast: A History of the Boys’ Brigade, 1883-1984 
edited by John Springhall.
Collins, 304 pp., £10, June 1983, 0 00 434280 1
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... the range of their fears and excitements. Describing his rather tortured teenage life, Bertrand Russell’s autobiography stresses that while outwardly well-behaved, he ‘found living at home only endurable at the cost of complete silence about everything that interested me’. Barbara Wootton and her childhood friends went further, and fended off the ...

Grail Trail

C.H. Roberts, 4 March 1982

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail 
by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln.
Cape, 445 pp., £8.95, January 1982, 0 224 01735 7
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The Foreigner: A Search for the First-Century Jesus 
by Desmond Stewart.
Hamish Hamilton, 181 pp., £9.95, October 1981, 0 241 10686 9
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Satan: The Early Christian Tradition 
by Jeffrey Burton Russell.
Cornell, 258 pp., £14, November 1981, 0 8014 1267 6
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... by one of the authors. One claim which the authors make most surely be discounted: that Pope John XXIII may have had connections with the Prieuré. While admitting that the claim is incapable of proof, they point, among other insubstantial considerations, to his lifting of the ban on Freemasonry. They assert that his Apostolic Letter of 1960 (the text of ...

Finishing Touches

Susannah Clapp, 20 December 1984

Charlotte Mew and her Friends 
by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Collins, 240 pp., £12.95, July 1984, 0 00 217008 6
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The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Vol. I: 1903-17 
edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott.
Oxford, 376 pp., £15, September 1984, 0 19 812613 1
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... her siblings’ madness. Harold was less enthusiastic. He had his own nightmares – one starred John Galsworthy ‘belabouring’ him with a huge steak – and his own sexual problems: he climbed into bed on his wedding night grunting ‘Come here, boy.’ He may have been disturbed by Mew’s quaintness; he certainly found her difficult. When he published ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: Dining Out, 4 June 1998

... schoolboy could be the next prime minister doesn’t cross either of our minds. On the other hand, John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of the Defence ...

Scarisbrick’s Bomb

Peter Gwyn, 20 December 1984

Reformation and Revolution 1558-1660 
by Robert Ashton.
Granada, 503 pp., £18, February 1984, 0 246 10666 2
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The Reformation and the English People 
by J.J. Scarisbrick.
Blackwell, 203 pp., £14.50, March 1984, 0 631 13424 7
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... recent wave of ‘revisionism’. The revisionist historians of the Stuart period, led by Conrad Russell with Kevin Sharpe in support, have sought to persuade us that, contrary to what most English historians have led us to believe, the first two Stuart kings were on the whole a good thing, the Parliamentarians a bad thing. Perhaps even more important than ...