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Who kicked them out?

Diarmaid MacCulloch: St Patrick’s Purgatory, 1 August 2019

St Patrick Retold: The Legend and History of Ireland’s Patron Saint 
by Roy Flechner.
Princeton, 320 pp., £22, March 2019, 978 0 691 18464 7
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... to prove his credentials as a universal or Catholic Christian, and so rehearses an otherwise unknown version of a creed to sum up his faith. This creed may represent a pre-existing fragment of British Church liturgy, but in any case it is intended to prove Patrick’s theological affinity with the two universal Christian creeds in circulation by the end ...

Kettles boil, classes struggle

Terry Eagleton: Lukács recants, 20 February 2003

A Defence of ‘History and Class Consciousness’: Tailism and the Dialectic 
by Georg Lukács, translated by Esther Leslie.
Verso, 182 pp., £10, June 2002, 1 85984 370 0
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... streets of Paris in 1968, ‘discourse’ or the floating signifier could keep it warm. It is not unknown for followers of Michel Foucault to celebrate the anarchic force of madness while voting Liberal Democrat. You can back Tony Blair and Pierre Bourdieu with equal enthusiasm. In the era of Bolshevism, by contrast, theory had at times to hobble hard to keep ...

Who were they?

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: ‘Thuggee’, 3 December 2009

Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of ‘Thuggee’ 
edited by Kim Wagner.
Oxford, 318 pp., £22.99, January 2009, 978 0 19 569815 2
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... on Sleeman, ‘enters a mysterious world of superstition, ritual and death’ and ‘uncovers an unknown side of his personality, a mystic affinity with the blood brotherhood’ of the thugs. While Merchant’s sometime collaborators (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala as well as James Ivory) seem to have winced when faced with the chief plot premise – that an ...

Questions of Class

Peter Green: Alcibiades the Vandal, 25 April 2013

The Mutilation of the Herms: Unpacking an Ancient Mystery 
by Debra Hamel.
CreateSpace, 54 pp., £5, March 2012, 978 1 4750 5193 3
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... sacred and the secular’.* Though vandalism by drunken revellers, then as now, was by no means unknown, the incident was at once recognised as something different. It was too widespread, too well organised, too deliberately selective, to be explained by random or casual rowdiness, and Athens’s citizens for the most part took it very seriously. There were ...

Toxic Lozenges

Jenny Diski: Arsenic, 8 July 2010

The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain Was Poisoned at Home, Work and Play 
by James Whorton.
Oxford, 412 pp., £16.99, January 2010, 978 0 19 957470 4
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... than as Orwell suggests, passion). Many infants and children died from intestinal infections, an unknown number of which were actually deliberate arsenic poisoning. In 1849, Rebecca Smith was executed for killing eight of her babies after birth, having claimed in her defence that her husband was an alcoholic and that she feared her children ‘might come to ...

One Single Plan

Andrew Berry: Proto-Darwinism, 17 March 2005

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: A Visionary Naturalist 
by Hervé le Guyader, translated by Marjorie Grene.
Chicago, 302 pp., £31.50, February 2004, 0 226 47091 1
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... natural world were ‘more poets than observers’. Finally, however, he was pushed too far. Two unknown naturalists (so unknown that generations of historians have been unable to determine the first name of one of them) conjectured a link between molluscs and vertebrates. If, they argued, a vertebrate is bent backwards ...

Bottlenecks

Partha Dasgupta: What Environmentalism Overlooks, 19 May 2005

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive 
by Jared Diamond.
Allen Lane, 575 pp., £20, January 2005, 0 7139 9286 7
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... warming, the change would to all intents and purposes be irreversible. We know that up to some unknown set of limits, knowledge, skills, institutions and manufactured capital can substitute for nature’s resources; meaning that even if an economy decumulated some of its natural capital, in quantity or quality, its wealth would increase if it invested ...

Man on a Bicycle

Gillian Darley: Le Corbusier, 9 April 2009

Le Corbusier: A Life 
by Nicholas Fox Weber.
Knopf, 823 pp., $45, November 2008, 978 0 375 41043 7
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... himself, but did learn about ‘rhythm and subtle relations and many other things previously unknown to me’. That admission must have cost him dear: he was strikingly ungrateful to those who taught him. Barely three months had passed before he described the office as ‘hateful’. These two stints were the nearest he ever had to a formal architectural ...

Rebalancings

T.J. Clark: Bellini and Mantegna, 20 December 2018

Mantegna and Bellini 
National Gallery, London, until 27 January 2018Show More
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... scarce. Mantegna was the child of a carpenter, from a very ordinary village. His birthdate is also unknown.) When Bellini turned back to The Presentation of Christ in the Temple twenty years later he was the master of a new style, and dialogue with Mantegna had established itself as an aspect of that mastery – his great Agony in the Garden, done in response ...

Shaggy Horse Story

Julian Bell: Fabulising about Form, 17 December 2020

A History of Art History 
by Christopher Wood.
Princeton, 472 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 691 15652 1
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... these masks is art itself, which is unavailable to reason and not fully involved with history, an unknown external to man even if produced by man.Should we fall in with the wild Romanticism of that peroration? Should we fall in with the historicist judgment that canvases from a century ago constitute painting’s ‘high point’? Should one author attempt ...

I was the Human Torch

Lili Owen Rowlands: Guillaume Dustan, 15 December 2022

The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Vol. 1: ‘In My Room’, ‘I’m Going Out Tonight’, ‘Stronger Than Me’ 
edited by Thomas Clerc, translated by Daniel Maroun.
Semiotext(e), 383 pp., £14.99, June 2021, 978 1 63590 142 9
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... identity or sphere (either the nightclub or the library) that might foreclose some as yet unknown experience. The ad’s prose is also typical of Dustan: blasts of detail; a trashiness underpinned by the desire to describe the world exactly as he lives it; a craving for sex conjured by the trailing ellipses. ‘Autopornobiography’ was the way he ...

Knowing

Frank Kermode, 3 December 1981

Bliss 
by Peter Carey.
Faber, 296 pp., £6.50, November 1981, 0 571 11769 4
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Exotic Pleasures 
by Peter Carey.
Picador, 192 pp., £1.95, October 1981, 0 330 26550 4
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... McEwan has much more assurance and resource, and so has Raymond Carver, a writer virtually unknown in this country who superficially resembles Carey but is – up to now, at any rate – working at quite a different level. All the same, Exotic Pleasures is an accomplished book. So, for that matter, is Bliss, for Carey has narrative energy, and writes ...

Maxwell’s Equations

Nevill Mott, 19 November 1981

James Clerk Maxwell: A Biography 
by Ivan Tolstoy.
Canongate, 184 pp., £9.95, July 1981, 9780862410100
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... it is of the nature of science, especially of those branches of science which are spreading into unknown regions, to be continually ...’ Here the draft was left unfinished. It is tantalising not to know what this great man was going to write. But one can guess. And I cannot help concluding that it was his science, Maxwell’s equations, which influenced ...

ODQ

Richard Usborne, 24 January 1980

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations 
Oxford, 908 pp., £12.50, November 1980, 9780192115607Show More
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... if we were acquainted with them and approved the choice! How flat and disappointing should they be unknown to us! A moment later we heard ‘For while the tired waves, vainly breaking’ and sank back in a pleasant agony of relief. We whispered the lines affectionately to ourselves, following the speaker, or even kept a word or two ahead of him in order to ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Parasite’, 6 February 2020

... Literally. We and almost all the characters in the film are surprised to discover a secret cellar, unknown even to the owners of the house it belongs in. This is where the rich might live in the event of a nuclear attack from North Korea. If they knew how to get in, that is.So we are to think of a politics of fear as well as class, or more precisely perhaps of ...

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