Departure and Arrival Times

Sheldon Rothblatt, 18 August 1983

The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance 
by John Kenyon.
Weidenfeld, 322 pp., £16.50, March 1983, 0 297 78081 6
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... art. Prose and form naturally accommodate themselves to these responses – perhaps the price of that ‘authenticity’ which Lionel Trilling discussed and Richard Sennett deplores. Even John Burrow, to whom Kenyon pays a handsome tribute, shows these influences. The prose of the much celebrated A Liberal Descent ...

Made in Heaven

Frank Kermode, 10 November 1994

Frieda Lawrence 
by Rosie Jackson.
Pandora, 240 pp., £14.99, September 1994, 9780044409151
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The Married Man: A Life of D.H. Lawrence 
by Brenda Maddox.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 631 pp., £20, August 1994, 1 85619 243 1
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Kangaroo 
by D.H. Lawrence, edited by Bruce Steele.
Cambridge, 493 pp., £60, August 1994, 0 521 38455 9
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Twilight in Italy and Other Essays 
by D.H. Lawrence, edited by Paul Eggert.
Cambridge, 327 pp., £55, August 1994, 0 521 26888 5
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... by his extraordinary and apparently bohemian friendships and vagrancies. This adds a touch to Richard Hoggart’s famous puritan portrait. On the other hand, or possibly on the same hand, he is credited with some slightly sinister obsessions, reflected in his penchant for feminine names beginning with C: ‘the demanding female sexual organs’ are given ...
The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities 
by Philip Kitcher.
Allen Lane, 381 pp., £20, April 1996, 0 7139 9129 1
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... not to have an exaggerated view of the importance of genes to life. This has been exacerbated by Richard Dawkins’s eloquent and widely-read attempts to persuade us that we are nothing more than a gene’s way of making another gene. But the truth is that neither the chicken nor the egg comes first. Bodies, artefacts such as nests and burrows, proteins and ...

Why would Mother Nature bother?

Jerry Fodor, 6 March 2003

Freedom Evolves 
by Daniel Dennett.
Allen Lane, 347 pp., £20, February 2003, 0 7139 9339 1
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... is therefore interpretable ‘from the intentional stance’. There is, however, the usual price to be paid when theories, psychological or otherwise, are instrumentally construed: there’s no logical space for a distinction between true ones and the ones that merely save the appearances. That higher organisms seem to be free agents is, after all, no ...

No Escape

Bruce Robbins: Culture, 1 November 2001

Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress 
edited by Samuel Huntington and Lawrence Harrison.
Basic Books, 384 pp., £12.99, April 2001, 0 465 03176 5
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Culture/Metaculture 
by Francis Mulhern.
Routledge, 198 pp., £8.99, March 2000, 0 415 10230 8
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Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account 
by Adam Kuper.
Harvard, 299 pp., £12.50, November 2000, 0 674 00417 5
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... discussions of intellectuals, from Julien Benda, Thomas Mann, Eliot and Woolf through Orwell, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, Mulhern sketches the collective portrait of what he calls ‘Kulturkritik’. He is not blind to Kulturkritik’s virtues, but more interested in what’s wrong with it – namely, its political side effects. Speaking on ...

Then came the Hoover

Hugh Pennington: The Allergy Epidemic, 22 June 2006

Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady 
by Mark Jackson.
Reaktion, 288 pp., £25, May 2006, 1 86189 271 3
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... sense that the introduction happened in many places simultaneously. The early workers paid a heavy price for their enthusiastic use of unshielded tubes and long exposures. Painful progressive destructive dermatitis was followed by malignant skin cancers. Anaemia killed others. A definitive list of the radiologists, technical assistants and Crookes-tube ...

Bread and Butter

Catherine Hall: Attempts at Reparation, 15 August 2024

Colonial Countryside 
edited by Corinne Fowler and Jeremy Poynting.
Peepal Tree, 278 pp., £25, July, 978 1 84523 566 6
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Britain’s Slavery Debt: Reparations Now! 
by Michael Banner.
Oxford, 172 pp., £14.99, April, 978 0 19 888944 1
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... to the British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade. ‘Fatima’s Poem’ is addressed to Richard Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn (1737-1808), and was inspired by a visit to Penrhyn Castle, one of eleven National Trust houses involved in the project. Pennant’s family owned four sugar plantations in Jamaica and he used some of the profits to develop the ...

Authors and Climbers

Anthony Grafton, 5 October 1995

Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 
by Anne Goldgar.
Yale, 295 pp., £25, June 1995, 0 300 05359 2
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... or mitigate what some already called the ‘Despotique Tyranny of Booksellers’ – though at the price of subjecting them to what modern authors often revile as the triumphant idiocy of copyeditors. The existence of these figures, whom Goldgar describes, quite reasonably, as the first literary agents, points to the increasing specialisation and ...

Other People’s Capital

John Lanchester: Conrad and Barbara Black, 14 December 2006

Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge 
by Tom Bower.
Harper, 436 pp., £20, November 2006, 0 00 723234 9
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... Post. He was, or seemed to be, on the verge of authentic global tycoonship. Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle were proud ornaments of the Hollinger board. After the end of his first marriage in 1991 Black married Barbara Amiel, a right-wing journalist who had been born in London, moved to Canada as a teenager, and made a name for herself as a polemicist ...

When the beam of light has gone

Peter Wollen: Godard Turns Over, 17 September 1998

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard 
by Wheeler Winston Dixon.
SUNY, 290 pp., £17.99, March 1997, 0 7914 3285 8
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Speaking about Godard 
by Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki.
New York, 256 pp., $55, July 1998, 0 8147 8066 0
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... unashamed fan of minor Hollywood pictures. Breathless, as Godard readily admitted, was inspired by Richard Quine’s Pushover and could be seen as the direct sequel to Otto Preminger’s Bonjour tristesse. The central character of the film, the petty criminal played by Belmondo, modelled his self-image on that of Humphrey Bogart in Mark Robson’s The Harder ...

Too Obviously Cleverer

Ferdinand Mount: Harold Macmillan, 8 September 2011

Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan 
by D.R. Thorpe.
Pimlico, 887 pp., £16.99, September 2011, 978 1 84413 541 7
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The Macmillan Diaries Vol. II: Prime Minister and After 1957-66 
edited by Peter Catterall.
Macmillan, 758 pp., £40, May 2011, 978 1 4050 4721 0
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... political chaos in Italy and then of the warring factions in Greece was nothing short of masterly. Richard Crossman, then assistant chief of psychological warfare at AFHQ, concluded in a shrewd single sentence: ‘I suspect it was in Algiers, where he could do all the thinking and take all the decisions while Ike took all the credit, that Harold Macmillan ...

The Saudi Trillions

Malise Ruthven, 7 September 2017

... move, part of a Saudi-UAE effort to counter what they present as Iranian influence. As Richard Sokolsky and Aaron David Miller put it in an article for Politico, The crown prince engineered this dispute not to punish Qatar for its financing of terrorism (a hypocritical comment coming from the Saudis, whose own citizens have provided funding to ...

The Crisis in Economic Theory

Jon Elster, 20 October 1983

An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change 
by Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter.
Harvard, 437 pp., £20, October 1982, 0 674 27227 7
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A General Theory of Exploitation and Class 
by John Roemer.
Harvard, 298 pp., £22, September 1982, 0 674 34440 5
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... firms. Partial equilibrium situations take into account the behaviour of a few firms considered as price-setters rather than passive price-takers. One may also introduce uncertainty, in the form of probability distributions entertained by the firm, and time, in the form of intertemporal markets. Technical change may be ...

What did happen?

David Edgar: Ukraine, 21 January 2016

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine 
by Serhii Plokhy.
Allen Lane, 381 pp., £25, December 2015, 978 0 241 18808 8
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In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine 
by Tim Judah.
Allen Lane, 256 pp., £20, January 2016, 978 0 241 19882 7
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Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West 
by Andrew Wilson.
Yale, 236 pp., £12.99, October 2014, 978 0 300 21159 7
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Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands 
by Richard Sakwa.
I.B. Tauris, 297 pp., £9.99, January 2015, 978 1 78453 527 8
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... went ape.’ This view is challenged in the other immediate response to the 2013-14 events, Richard Sakwa’s Frontline Ukraine. Sakwa has reservations about the 2004 Orange Revolution; the question of whether it was a people’s revolution or a revolutionary coup ‘remains pertinent to this day’. The Maidan uprising began as a protest against the ...

Like Colonel Sanders

Christopher Tayler: The Stan Lee Era, 2 December 2021

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee 
by Abraham Riesman.
Bantam, 320 pp., £20, February, 978 0 593 13571 6
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Stan Lee: A Life in Comics 
by Liel Leibovitz.
Yale, 192 pp., £16.99, June 2020, 978 0 300 23034 5
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... centre which Wertham opened in a church basement in Harlem in 1946 with help from Ellison and Richard Wright. Six years later Wertham was called as an expert witness for the NAACP in one of the cases reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education. With the evidence of his experiences treating traumatised children in Harlem, he persuaded a federal judge that ...