How to See inside a French Milkman

Peter Campbell, 31 July 1997

Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the 20th Century 
by Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles.
Rutgers, 380 pp., $35.95, January 1997, 0 8135 2358 3
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... and then in America, built an experimental scanner which used a computer to reconstruct images. David Kuhl transmitted the first image of a living human thorax in 1965, using a radioactive source and a computer monitor, while Ronald Bracewell, back in the Fifties, had done work on the mathematics of image reconstruction in the context of radio ...

Modernity

Bernard Williams, 5 January 1989

Whose justice? Which rationality? 
by Alasdair MacIntyre.
Duckworth, 410 pp., £35, March 1988, 9780715621981
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... Scotland in which it flourished, by the English. It was subverted from within by a disloyal Scot, David Hume, the first of two chapters on whom is indeed called ‘Hume’s Anglicising Subversion’. Hume is conventionally regarded not only as the greatest of British philosophers but also as one of the most amiable and personally admirable, but ...

Meltings

Nicholas Penny, 18 February 1988

Painting as an Art 
by Richard Wollheim.
Thames and Hudson, 384 pp., £28, November 1987, 0 500 23495 7
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... other artists who had treated the subject (most notably Pietro da Corona and Jacques-Louis David) had done so, is the subsequent decision made by King Seleucus to give Stratonice to his son to save the boy’s life. I take it that this is the act which could be described as the father’s ‘melting’. And yet the King’s grief for his son is surely ...

Chef de Codage

Brian Rotman: Codes, 15 July 1999

Between Silk and Cyanide: The Story of SOE’s Code War 
by Leo Marks.
HarperCollins, 614 pp., £19.99, November 1998, 0 00 255944 7
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... a massive account of codes and cyphers that dominates the field, the American historian David Kahn devotes only a few pages to SOE, most of which are taken up with its notorious mistake. He talks of its ‘stupidity and incompetence’ and, with a hint of schadenfreude, describes the Dutch affair as ‘the worst Allied defeat in the espionage ...

Two Hares and a Priest

Patricia Beer: Pushkin, 13 May 1999

Pushkin 
by Elizabeth Feinstein.
Weidenfeld, 309 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 297 81826 0
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... us off with the diplomatic and historical background of Pushkin’s life. Feinstein also mentions David Magarshack’s biography respectfully for what was at the time – 1967 – its up-to-date research but reprovingly for its lack of notes and references. (In fact notes do often appear in Magarshack’s book, as parentheses in the text, and there is an ...

Woken up in Seattle

Michael Byers: WTO woes, 6 January 2000

... producing what it’s best at producing, and exporting that abroad. The writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo are so influential in the trade world that most experts refuse even to discuss the merits of this basic laissez-faire assumption. The US, born out of a tax revolt in the same year that The Wealth of Nations was published, has long accepted it, and ...

Diary

Frank Kermode: Being a critic, 27 May 1999

... 19th century.’ This is true, and who will regret it, except maybe a few dedicated followers of F.R. Leavis, here the subject of a judicious piece by Stefan Collini, who understandably wonders why he should believe that ‘the possibility of living a truly human existence depends on the quality of reviewing in the literary weeklies’. But he is only saying ...

Vicarious Sages

Michael Mason, 3 November 1983

John Forster: A Literary Life 
by James Davies.
Leicester University Press, 318 pp., £25, June 1983, 0 7185 1164 6
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Mr George Eliot: A Biography of George Henry Lewes 
by David Williams.
Hodder, 288 pp., £12.95, June 1983, 0 340 25717 2
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Johnnie Cross 
by Terence de Vere White.
Gollancz, 153 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 575 03333 9
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... By a considerable coincidence there are now published within a short interval the first biographies of two substantial Victorian literary figures, over a hundred years after the death of either man. The coincidence is made more striking by the similarities between George Henry Lewes and John Forster. They were two of the stars of Victorian literary journalism: much in demand as editors, and absolutely reliable in their capacity to produce essays and reviews of first-rate quality on a huge range of topics at an intimidating speed ...

The Case for Geoffrey Hill

Tom Paulin, 4 April 1985

Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work 
edited by Peter Robinson.
Open University, 259 pp., £18, March 1985, 0 335 10588 2
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... participate in it. Still, he has signalled a wish to defect from Offa’s camp, and a reading of David Norbrook’s recent, excellent study of political poetry, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, should make him aware of the necessity for that ...

Morituri

D.A.N. Jones, 23 May 1985

Secret Villages 
by Douglas Dunn.
Faber, 170 pp., £8.95, April 1985, 0 571 13443 2
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Miss Peabody’s Inheritance 
by Elizabeth Jolley.
Viking, 157 pp., £7.95, April 1985, 0 670 47952 7
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Mr Scobie’s Riddle 
by Elizabeth Jolley.
Penguin, 226 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 0 14 007490 2
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The Modern Common Wind 
by Don Bloch.
Heinemann, 234 pp., £9.95, May 1985, 0 434 07551 5
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Fiskadoro 
by Denis Johnson.
Chatto, 221 pp., £9.50, May 1985, 0 7011 2935 2
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... of Scotland. I feel like a film reviewer who has started the week with an Ealing comedy or one of David Lean’s novel-adaptations (cutting out all the messy, sissy bits) and then has to plough through a set of desperate cast-of-thousands horror-movies. No doubt, Don Bloch and Denis Johnson are properly concerned about leprosy in Africa and the dangers of ...

Another A.N. Wilson

Michael Irwin, 3 December 1981

Who was Oswald Fish? 
by A.N. Wilson.
Secker, 314 pp., £6.95, October 1981, 0 436 57606 6
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... they include Jeremy Tradescant, who brings us up to date on his sister – but Charles’s lover, David Matheson, is a sad, complex figure, movingly portrayed. A passage of intimate feeling can follow a scene of black farce. It’s hard to say how these extremes are harmonised. Perhaps the historical perspective provided by Fish’s diaries permits of certain ...

The Bible as Fiction

George Caird, 4 November 1982

The Story of the Stories: The Chosen People and its God 
by Dan Jacobson.
Secker, 211 pp., £8.95, September 1982, 0 436 22048 2
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The Art of Biblical Narrative 
by Robert Alter.
Allen and Unwin, 195 pp., £10, May 1982, 0 04 801022 7
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The Great Code: The Bible and Literature 
by Northrop Frye.
Routledge, 261 pp., £9.95, June 1982, 0 7100 9038 2
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... how from these laconic texts, figures like Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph, Judah, Tamar, Moses, Saul, David and Ruth emerge, characters who, beyond any archetypal role they may play as bearers of a divine mandate, have been etched as indelibly vivid individuals in the imagination of a hundred generations’. This aim, he warns us, cannot be achieved without ...

Voices

Seamus Deane, 21 April 1983

The Pleasures of Gaelic Poetry 
edited by Sean Mac Reamoinn.
Allen Lane, 272 pp., £8.95, November 1982, 0 7139 1284 7
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... Irish. Hartnett confesses himself to be ‘obsessed by the work and mind of Daibhi O Bruadair’ (David Broderick or Brouder), the 17th-century poet from the Limerick area who witnessed the tragic sequence of events which destroyed his native cultural habitat: ‘the Popish Plot, the coming of Cromwell, the battle of the Boyne, the Treaty of Limerick and its ...

Exact Walking

Christopher Hill, 19 June 1980

Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 
by R.T. Kendall.
Oxford, 252 pp., £12.50, February 1980, 0 19 826716 9
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... optimism of some of the earlier reformers. A recent impressive book by Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village,* suggested that Calvinist theology became especially acceptable to parish élites, the minority who were prospering in the great economic divide of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, as against the mass ...

George Eliot, Joyce and Cambridge

Michael Mason, 2 April 1981

... distinct from their contemporaries, in their liking for this form. Adam Bede uses it as much as David Copperfield: that is, more than five times as often as Jane Eyre. Here is a surprising pattern of convergence and divergence in the Victorian novel which could not be registered in the kind of account offered by MacCabe (for whom the Dagley-Mr Brooke ...