Function v. Rhetoric

Peter Campbell: Engineers and Architects, 10 April 2008

Architect and Engineer 
by Andrew Saint.
Yale, 541 pp., £45, March 2008, 978 0 300 12443 9
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... mundane infrastructure becomes poetry. They aren’t as majestic as great masonry multi-spans like John Rennie’s Waterloo Bridge (with its demolition in the 1930s the Thames lost its finest crossing), or as Promethean in their ambitions as the great American suspension bridges, but the low curves of Maillart’s spans manage to look as if, for once, an ...

Diary

Oliver Whang: Two Appalachias, 1 August 2024

... United Mine Workers of America. He joined the union and his wife hung a portrait of its president, John L. Lewis, above her piano. But the Turners, like other Black families in town, were used by mine supervisors to destroy the solidarity between miners, in an attempt to break the union. The UMWA had been integrated since its founding in 1890 and in parts of ...

Why Twice?

Rosemary Hill: Fire at the Mack, 24 October 2024

The Mack: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art 
by Robyne Calvert.
Yale, 208 pp., £35, April, 978 0 300 23985 0
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... was uneventful, ‘at least until it started to go wrong’. From articled pupil in the office of John Hutchison, a local architect, he went to the more eminent firm of Honeyman and Keppie as a draughtsman while studying part-time at the GSA, then housed in rooms above the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street, just round the corner from the current ...

Saturdays at the Sewage Works

Rosemary Hill: Martin Parr’s People, 6 November 2025

Utterly Lazy and Inattentive: Martin Parr in Words and Pictures 
by Martin Parr and Wendy Jones.
Particular, 306 pp., £30, September, 978 0 241 74082 8
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... at him. The idea was conceived as a revisiting of a book by one of Parr’s photographic heroes, John Hinde. Hinde’s Exmoor Village, published in 1947, was a study of Luccombe, but that had already, in a sense, gone. It now belongs to the National Trust and so, Parr concludes, is ‘completely stuck in the past’. He went to Chew Stoke instead. It had ...

United States of Amnesia

Eric Foner, 9 September 2021

The Ground Breaking: The Tulsa Race Massacre and an American City’s Search for Justice 
by Scott Ellsworth.
Icon, 304 pp., £16.99, May 2021, 978 1 78578 727 0
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... and institutions, all run by and serving African Americans. To be sure, as the Black historian John Hope Franklin, who spent his early years in Tulsa, pointed out in his memoirs, the label ‘Black Wall Street’ was a bit of a misnomer. Most of the residents worked as cooks and maids in the homes of white Tulsans and many lived in rented rooms or shacks ...

I want to be the baby

Kasia Boddy: Barthelme’s High Jinks, 18 August 2022

Collected Stories 
by Donald Barthelme, edited by Charles McGrath.
Library of America, 1004 pp., £40, July 2021, 978 1 59853 684 3
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... 1960s were a great era of collage in all sorts of media: not just Robert Rauschenberg, but also John Ashbery and Bob Dylan. For Barthelme, it wasn’t simply a matter of playing with found forms or language. That was ‘cheapo surrealism’. Instead his stories explore situations (‘The Party’, ‘Brain Damage’, ‘City Life’) that are experienced as ...

Who digs the mines?

Andrew Liu: Chinese Exclusion, 21 July 2022

The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics 
by Mae Ngai.
Norton, 440 pp., £21.99, September 2021, 978 0 393 63416 7
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... in San Francisco published a pamphlet taking issue with claims made by California’s governor, John Bigler, who had characterised the state’s 7520 Chinese migrants as servile ‘coolies’ undercutting white workers. ‘The poor Chinaman does not come here as a slave,’ Tong Achick and Chun Aching wrote in An Analysis of the Chinese Question. ‘He ...

You Muddy Fools

Dan Jacobson: In the months before his death Ian Hamilton talked about himself to Dan Jacobson, 14 January 2002

... of the usual morose adolescent parables and things like that. The first issue had a foreword by John Wain, the novelist, who had just appeared then and was very famous. I wrote to him to ask if there was some message he could send to youthful aspirants and he did. It was rather good, about half a page, which ended: ‘and, if all this fails, back to the ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Sedan Stories, 8 August 2002

... do you carry the King in a common Cedan, as they carry such as have the Plague?”’ John Evelyn, too, had a low opinion of the contraption, ‘it being held a conveyance for voluptuous persons and women of pleasure to their leu’d Rendivozes incognito’. The Covent Garden Morning Frolick (1747), an engraving by Louis Boitard that’s ...

Pens and Heads

Blair Worden: Printing and reading, 24 August 2000

The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making 
by Adrian Johns.
Chicago, 707 pp., £14.50, May 2000, 0 226 40122 7
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Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England 
by Kevin Sharpe.
Yale, 358 pp., £25, April 2000, 0 300 08152 9
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... and Edmond Halley, those grandees of the Royal Society, and on the other the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, the doyen of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Johns levels the same complaint against historians of science as against Eisenstein: that they take the subject ‘outside history’ and miss the struggles, practical as well as ...

Against Consciousness

Richard Gregory, 24 January 1980

Pavlov 
by Jeffrey Gray.
Fontana, 140 pp., £1.25, September 1980, 9780006343042
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J.B. Watson: The Founder of Behaviourism 
by David Cohen.
Routledge, 297 pp., £8.95, September 1980, 0 7100 0054 5
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... links’. These were discussed in various forms by Hume, both James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, Bain, and most effectively by Hartley. As Jeffrey Gray points out, a major impact of Pavlov’s work was to bring experiments to bear on philosophical notions of mind, rather as the great physicists have, over a much longer ...

It’s already happened

James Meek: The NHS Goes Private, 22 September 2011

... the private sector sets aside for corporate sheen, although it does have a museum dedicated to John Charnley, who, almost half a century ago, pioneered the popular benchmark of the NHS’s success or failure, the hip replacement operation. They still do hips at Wrightington, and knees, and elbows, and shoulders. They deal with joint problems that are too ...

Diary

Eric Hobsbawm: My Days as a Jazz Critic, 27 May 2010

... I owe my years as a jazz reporter to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which made the British cultural establishment of the mid-1950s take notice of a music so evidently dear to the new and talented Angry Young Men. When, needing some money, I saw that Kingsley Amis wrote in the Observer on a subject about which he obviously knew no more and possibly less than I did, I called a friend at the New Statesman ...

Diary

Tom Crewe: Wrestling Days, 16 December 2021

... Wrestling was big. Both WWF and WCW were available, briefly, on terrestrial TV, and my friend John and I founded our own wrestling magazine. We hashed it together with the help of the pre-broadband Ask Jeeves internet, surreptitiously, with nerve-shredding slowness, loading pages during IT lessons so that we could copy and paste match reports into no ...

Short Cuts

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: Plainly Unconstitutional, 21 October 2021

... reached a decision that President Andrew Jackson disliked, Jackson is said to have remarked: ‘John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.’) If the court’s decisions are not seen as legitimate, its power could fade.Stephen Breyer, a Supreme Court justice since 1994, is concerned that this power is under threat. In his new book, The ...