Fathomless Strangeness of the Ordinary

Stephen Greenblatt: Disenchantment, 7 January 1999

Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 
by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park.
Zone, 511 pp., £19.95, June 1998, 0 942299 90 6
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... was not, however, the only available position: medieval philosophers and theologians influenced by Aristotle sought for the most part to reduce the scope of wonder. The task of the wise man, in the words of a 13th-century text mistakenly attributed to Albertus Magnus, was ‘to make wonders cease’. For them, too great a readiness to marvel at things was the ...

Owning Art

Arthur C. Danto, 7 March 1996

Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in 17th-Century Europe 
by Jonathan Brown.
Yale, 264 pp., £35, September 1995, 0 300 06437 3
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Art & Money 
by Marc Shell.
Chicago, 230 pp., £27.95, June 1995, 0 226 75213 5
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... Theory of Truth, in a tradition which goes back through Avicenna and Isaac Israeli to Aristotle. That Israeli was a Jew hardly makes the theory Jewish. Nor is the theory itself something that Heidegger repudiates: he simply (!) wants to see in what such a formulation is grounded, going on to show that truth refers to a certain mode of ...

This jellyfish can sting

Jonathan Rée, 13 November 1997

Truth: A History 
by Felipe Fernández-Armesto.
Bantam, 247 pp., £12.99, October 1997, 0 593 04140 2
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... in our sensory receptors’, whereas logical thinking goes back to ancient Greece: ‘it was Aristotle who taught us how to think.’ Questions of logic, meaning or knowledge may, however, need to be handled with rather more interpretative tact than this: they do not lend themselves to the construction of such definite periodisations and lines of ...

Orrery and Claw

Greg Woolf: Archimedes, 18 November 2010

Archimedes and the Roman Imagination 
by Mary Jaeger.
Michigan, 230 pp., £64.50, June 2010, 978 0 472 11630 0
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... seem more regal was to patronise scholars, just as Alexander had patronised his teacher, Aristotle. Alexandria, the new capital of Egypt, had the greatest concentration of scholars, including the mathematicians Euclid, Eratosthenes, Conon, Apollonius and Diocles, with several of whom Archimedes corresponded. It’s quite possible that he himself ...

The Irish Savant’s Problem

Julian Bell: Diderot on Blindness, 21 June 2012

Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay 
by Kate Tunstall.
Continuum, 238 pp., £17.99, August 2011, 978 1 4411 1932 2
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... our intuitive expectations these days – and of the sensus communis, the concept, running from Aristotle to Descartes, of a central mental junction box. If the man cured of blindness had no option but to reach out and check the objects’ identity with his fingers: if concepts of form, and of all that more generally might depend on them, could only be ...

Don’t look

Julian Bell: Perspective’s Arab Origins, 25 October 2012

Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science 
by Hans Belting, translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider.
Harvard, 303 pp., £25, September 2011, 978 0 674 05004 4
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... of themselves that the objects have generated – copies termed ‘images’ or ‘simulacra’. Aristotle saw there were problems with this hypothesis, but for a long time it remained the default account of vision – probably because it answers to the intuition that if I see you, I have some sort of hold on you. It was only under the Fatimid caliphs of ...

Play the game

Michael Kulikowski: Cleopatra, 31 March 2011

Zenobia of Palmyra: History, Myth and the Neo-Classical Imagination 
by Rex Winsbury.
Duckworth, 198 pp., £16.99, September 2010, 978 0 7156 3853 8
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Cleopatra: A Life 
by Stacy Schiff.
Virgin, 368 pp., £20, November 2010, 978 0 7535 3955 2
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... Longinus, whose On the Sublime is the most important work of ancient literary criticism between Aristotle and Augustine, served as tutor to the royal teenager. While the western empire, from Britain to the Balkans, remained threatened by invasion and was carved up among a series of competing emperors, Zenobia set about conquering the largest single kingdom ...

Walsingham’s Plumber

Patrick Collinson: John Bossy, 5 July 2001

Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story 
by John Bossy.
Yale, 189 pp., £18.95, May 2001, 0 300 08400 5
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... is sufficient that the man should not be a liar’), and I think Cicero was only quoting Aristotle. At about the same time, Bossy reviewed Natalie Zemon Davis’s Fiction in the Archives, and somewhat mischievously. People in 16th-century France, he thought, were perfectly capable of distinguishing between fact and fiction: which was to brush aside ...

Shopping in Lucerne

E.S. Turner, 9 June 1994

Addicted to Romance: The Life and Adventures of Elinor Glyn 
by Joan Hardwick.
Deutsch, 306 pp., £20, June 1994, 0 233 98866 1
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Mother of Oscar: The Life of Jane Francesca Wilde 
by Joy Melville.
Murray, 308 pp., £19.99, June 1994, 0 7195 5102 1
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... hand. She tried unsuccessfully to run an English salon and to preserve sanity by keeping Plato and Aristotle at her bedside; but that did not stop her dancing with the equivalent of toy boys in the ominously named Patent Leather Room. Meeting Chaplin, she said he did not look as funny as she had expected, and he replied: ‘Neither do you.’ The on-off affair ...

‘Faustus’ and the Politics of Magic

Charles Nicholl, 8 March 1990

Dr Faustus 
by Christopher Marlowe, edited by Roma Gill.
Black, 109 pp., £3.95, December 1989, 0 7136 3231 3
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Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare 
by John Mebane.
Nebraska, 309 pp., £26.95, July 1989, 0 8032 3133 4
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Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance 
by William Huffman.
Routledge, 252 pp., £30, November 1989, 0 415 00129 3
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Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England 
by Patrick Curry.
Polity, 238 pp., £27.50, September 1989, 0 7456 0604 0
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... an alternative, secret tradition of revealed knowledge. Faustus’s discarding of authorities – Aristotle, Galen, Justinian and St Jerome are named in the opening soliloquy – is in the iconoclastic spirit of Paracelsus, who cast the medical Canon of Avicenna onto the St John’s Day bonfire in Basle, and of Cornelius Agrippa in his sweeping ...

Gestures of Embrace

Nicholas Penny, 27 October 1988

Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market 
by Svetlana Alpers.
Thames and Hudson, 160 pp., £20, May 1988, 0 226 01514 9
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The Light of Early Italian Painting 
by Paul Hills.
Yale, 160 pp., £20, March 1987, 0 300 03617 5
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Italian Paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection 
by John Pope-Hennessy.
Metropolitan Museum and Princeton, 331 pp., £50, December 1987, 0 87099 479 4
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... and lavish traffic in paint. In passages of certain paintings – the chain of honour in the Aristotle or the helmet in the Man with the Golden Helmet – the two are made one.’ Hoarding has surely never been associated with ‘traffic in money’, which must involve spending. Also, ‘loving and lavish traffic in paint’ suggests flow and ...

Mae West and the British Raj

Wendy Doniger: Dinosaur Icons, 18 February 1999

The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon 
by W.J.T. Mitchell.
Chicago, 321 pp., £25, November 1998, 0 226 53204 6
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... about all of this is Mitchell, who teaches at an institution whose mascot is not Barney but Aristotle? When Robert Bakker urges us in The Dinosaur Heresies (1986) to say, when we see Canada geese flying north, ‘The dinosaurs are migrating, it must be spring!’ we know, Mitchell argues, ‘that the cart is pulling the horse’. Surely this is a charge ...

By the Width of a Street

Christopher Prendergast: Literary geography, 29 October 1998

An Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 
by Franco Moretti.
Verso, 206 pp., £16, August 1998, 1 85984 883 4
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... designed to break with more traditional conceptions of the foundation of narrative, which, from Aristotle to Lessing, and from Hegel to Lukács and Ricoeur, had been temporal. In L’Education sentimentale, Lukács wrote in his Theory of the Novel, ‘time is indissolubly wedded to the form,’ and this could easily be said of the genre as a whole. How ...

Nobel Savage

Steven Shapin: Kary Mullis, 1 July 1999

Dancing Naked in the Mind Field 
by Kary Mullis.
Bloomsbury, 209 pp., £12.99, March 1999, 0 7475 4376 3
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... documents which clearly stated that God was everywhere. Even some garbage from mistranslations of Aristotle that said “Nature abhorred a vacuum” was taken to mean that Nature just fucking wouldn’t allow one at all and that Boyle was an idiot.’ But ‘Sir Robert’ and his mates ignored the Catholics, and that was truly a Good Thing. Kary Mullis on ...

Slices of Cake

Gilberto Perez: Alfred Hitchcock, 19 August 1999

Hitchcock’s Secret Notebooks: An Authorised and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock 
by Dan Auiler.
Bloomsbury, 567 pp., £20, May 1999, 0 7475 4490 5
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... the story and the writing of the dialogue. On the central importance of plot Hitchcock agreed with Aristotle; characterisation and dialogue came later. Initially called From amongst the Dead, the title of the novel on which it was based, Vertigo, we learn from Auiler’s production history, went through several drafts and three different writers: first the ...