Exhibitionists

Hal Foster: Curation, 4 June 2015

Ways of Curating 
by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Penguin, 192 pp., £9.99, March 2015, 978 0 241 95096 8
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Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World – And Everything Else 
by David Balzer.
Pluto, 140 pp., £8.99, April 2015, 978 0 7453 3597 1
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... than touched on by the Canadian art critic David Balzer in his breezy book about ‘how curating took over the art world – and everything else’. But both do point out how far we have come from the original avatars of the term (whose root is cura or ‘care’): the curatores, the civil servants who oversaw public works like the aqueducts in ancient ...

Boiling Electrons

David Kaiser, 27 September 2012

Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe 
by George Dyson.
Allen Lane, 401 pp., £25, March 2012, 978 0 7139 9750 7
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... to find too much going on’ there. The calm was disturbed by members of a new team assembled by John von Neumann, the legendary mathematician. Von Neumann too had spent much of the war at Los Alamos. There, he was gripped by a vision as remarkable as Charles Babbage’s a century before: perhaps one could build a machine to calculate. Von Neumann was ...

Quite a Gentleman

Robert Irwin: The invariably savage Tamerlane, 19 May 2005

Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World 
by Justin Marozzi.
HarperCollins, 449 pp., £25, August 2004, 9780007116119
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... the Lame’). He came into the full light of history only in the 1360s. In 1366, he took control of Samarkand, the city that was to be his capital. In 1372, he invaded Khorezm. Other invasions followed: Moghulistan (1375-76), Khorasan (1381), Caspian territories (1382), Azerbaijan (1386), Asia Minor (1387), Russia (1390-91), Georgia ...

Why are we here?

W.G. Runciman: The Biology of Belief, 7 February 2002

Religion Explained: The Human Instincts that Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors 
by Pascal Boyer.
Heinemann, 430 pp., £20, September 2001, 0 434 00843 5
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... to a personal ‘demon’, and the mild fascination with the occult shared by Pliny the Elder, John Buchan, and generations of ghost-story enthusiasts and horror-movie buffs? Pascal Boyer tells us in his opening chapter that ‘religion is about the existence and causal powers of non-observable entities and agencies.’ He doesn’t appear to have in mind ...

Snooked Duck Tail

Lucy Daniel: Jeannette Winterson, 3 June 2004

Lighthousekeeping 
by Jeanette Winterson.
Fourth Estate, 232 pp., £15, May 2004, 0 00 718151 5
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... genial voice of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). The narrator’s name is Silver, as in Long John. She lives with her mother in Salts, in the far north-west of Scotland near Cape Wrath: ‘cliff-perched, wind-cleft’, a ‘Fossil Town’, ‘salted and preserved by the sea that had destroyed it too’. When her mother falls to her death, Silver and her ...

A Hideous Skeleton, with Cries and Dismal Howlings

Nina Auerbach: The haunting of the Hudson Valley, 24 June 2004

Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley 
by Judith Richardson.
Harvard, 296 pp., £19.95, October 2003, 0 674 01161 9
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... familiar in Civil War hauntings as well). One who makes regular reappearances is the British spy John André, who was captured at Tarrytown and hanged at Tappan for his supposedly traitorous collaboration with Benedict Arnold. André was an attractive felon: even Americans called him ‘beautiful’, ‘manly’ and ‘noble’, and his charmed memory ...

At Quai Branly

Jeremy Harding: Jacques Chirac’s museum, 4 January 2007

... the motel. A solution was found. It appeared to favour the rugged party over the dandies and took the form of a new commission. The building would go up on a plot of public land across the river from the Palais de Chaillot, the home of the Musée de l’Homme. Chirac had got what he wanted without having to go begging. The arguments surrounding a new ...

How can we make this place more like Bosnia?

Philip Connors: Absurdistan, 2 August 2007

Absurdistan 
by Gary Shteyngart.
Granta, 333 pp., £10.99, June 2007, 978 1 86207 972 4
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... ethnic conflict. American reviewers have been unable to resist comparing Shteyngart’s book with John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, though the two novels share very little beyond an omnivorous, obese hero who falls for a girl from the Bronx. Temperamentally, Misha Vainberg is Ignatius Reilly’s opposite. Reilly railed against the lack of ...

Warp Speed

Frank Close: Gravitational Waves, 7 February 2008

Travelling at the Speed of Thought: Einstein and the Quest for Gravitational Waves 
by Daniel Kennefick.
Princeton, 319 pp., £19.95, May 2007, 978 0 691 11727 0
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... if, in contrast to Newton’s theory of instantaneous action at a distance, gravitational forces took time to propagate. Laplace’s insight was that the cumulative effect of the planets on the Moon as well as on the Earth reduced the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit bit by bit over the centuries, causing the Moon to approach the Earth and reducing its ...

Dangerously Amiable

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal: Lafayette Reconsidered, 16 February 2017

The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered 
by Laura Auricchio.
Vintage, 432 pp., £11.99, August 2015, 978 0 307 38745 5
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... Revolution or its principles, and the feeling was mirrored on the other side of the ocean. John Adams told James Madison in 1798 that ‘there was not a single principle the same in the American and French Revolutions.’ Even Jefferson, one of the great American admirers of France, had lost his enthusiasm for its revolution. Many influential modern ...

At Tate Britain

T.J. Clark: Paul Nash , 2 February 2017

... Field’ (1939) It could have survived perfectly well. Perhaps it did, in John Nash’s (Paul’s younger brother) re-doings of Constable country, or Stanley Spencer’s topographies of Cookham. Landscape painting had always been, essentially and productively, nostalgic: the cult of ruins had mutated, on the whole without pain, into a ...

Instrumental Tricks

James Vincent: Prosthetic Brainpower, 5 October 2023

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator 
by Keith Houston.
Norton, 374 pp., £25, October, 978 0 393 88214 8
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... are logarithms, a type of mathematical operation first described by the Scottish mathematician John Napier in 1614. If you are multiplying a number p by itself to get another number q, the logarithm of q to base p is how many times you need to do the multiplication to reach q. So the logarithm of 8 to base 2 is 3, because you have to multiply 2 by itself ...

Diary

Will Frears: A Quiet Night In, 20 July 1995

... and dismal out. As we walked down to the centre to see what was happening, a child of about six took one look at me with my hood up and sunglasses on and said categorically: ‘It’s way past your bedtime.’ Suitably chastised, I resolved to take it a lot easier that day. Many people, it seemed, felt the same.Saturday day was accordingly spent uncovering ...

Mass equals pigment

Julian Bell: Cezanne’s Puzzles, 16 February 2023

Cezanne 
Tate Modern, until 12 March 2023Show More
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... and statuary, and finding that vein of taste commended by the mighty Delacroix, Cezanne always took it as read that his own work would obey expressive rhythms.Sometimes his ‘expressive’ accelerates into ‘wilful’. The droller ventures on show at Tate Modern play with the question ‘Will this be a painting, if I paint it?’ An abrupt slice of Paris ...

On Compost

Fraser MacDonald, 17 April 2025

... all to impress his mate.) Some Facebook posters even worry about spontaneous combustion, which I took to be just another flex, until on the hottest day of 2022, a wildfire started in a dry heap in the village of Wennington on the edge of East London and burned down eighteen houses. Compost doesn’t need to be hot and very often it isn’t. High temperatures ...