Superficially Pally

Jenny Turner: Richard Sennett, 22 March 2012

Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-Operation 
by Richard Sennett.
Allen Lane, 323 pp., £25, February 2012, 978 0 7139 9874 0
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... way he goes about trying to capture a phenomenon so complex and ineffable. There are readings from Aristotle and Freud and Diderot and Tocqueville. There are stories from Sennett’s youth, when he was growing up with his Communist mother in the housing projects of Cabrini Green in Chicago. There are stories from his maturity, as a ‘solid bourgeois’ who ...

I Will Tell You Everything

Rosemary Hill: Iris Murdoch, 22 April 2010

Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War – Letters and Diaries 1939-45 
edited by Peter Conradi.
Short Books, 303 pp., £16.99, January 2010, 978 1 906021 22 1
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With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch 
by David Morgan.
Kingston, 143 pp., £13.99, March 2010, 978 1 899999 42 2
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... The only problems that [matter] are the moral ones – & there I speak a different language from Aristotle.’ Her own moral, emotional, language was developing as she wrote. Thompson was not irrelevant, her warmth towards him is palpable, but he was as much audience as interlocutor and Conradi’s assertion that she had started to fall in love with him is ...

List your enemies

Alice Spawls: Deborah Levy, 16 June 2016

Hot Milk 
by Deborah Levy.
Hamish Hamilton, 218 pp., £12.99, March 2016, 978 0 241 14654 5
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... told me years ago that I must write Milky Way like this: γαλαξίας κύκλος’), to Aristotle in Chalcidice, to her father born in Thessaloniki, to the oldest star (13 billion years old) and back to the stars on her laptop (China, two years old). Γαλαξίας κύκλος means literally a ‘milky circle’. She has come to Almería with ...

How to Write It

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: India after Independence, 20 September 2007

India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy 
by Ramachandra Guha.
Macmillan, 900 pp., £25, April 2007, 978 0 230 01654 5
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The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Belknap, 403 pp., £19.95, June 2007, 978 0 674 02482 3
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... the size of Guha’s doorstop. After training in Hellenistic philosophy and the interpretation of Aristotle, Nussbaum has begun in recent years to write far more widely on issues of development, feminism and public affairs. Her interest in India stems from personal dealings over two decades with a number of prominent Indians (especially the family of Kshiti ...

In Your Guts You Know He’s Nuts

Thomas Sugrue: Barry Goldwater, 3 January 2008

The Conscience of a Conservative 
by Barry Goldwater.
Princeton, 144 pp., £8.95, June 2007, 978 0 691 13117 7
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... anti-democratic sentiments were as much an expression of realpolitik as a resuscitation of Aristotle and his 18th-century Anglo-American heirs. When he wrote The Conscience of a Conservative, the right had spent a quarter-century wandering in the desert of the New Deal. Even Goldwater’s fellow Republicans – like Eisenhower, Rockefeller and the ...

Masses and Classes

Ferdinand Mount: Gladstone, 17 February 2005

The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics 
by David Bebbington.
Oxford, 331 pp., £55, March 2004, 0 19 926765 0
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... he never became a Lockean, still less a Rawlsian. All his life he remained a dedicated follower of Aristotle and a believer that the most important fact about man was that he was a social animal. Gladstone was an Aristotelian Christian. Civil association was God’s will. Genesis had declared that it was ‘not good that man should be alone’. The polis was ...

Fraud Squad

Ferdinand Mount: Imposters, 2 August 2007

The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation 
by Rohan McWilliam.
Continuum, 363 pp., £25, March 2007, 978 1 85285 478 2
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A Romanov Fantasy: Life at the Court of Anna Anderson 
by Frances Welch.
Short Books, 327 pp., £14.99, February 2007, 978 1 904977 71 1
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The Lost Prince: The Survival of Richard of York 
by David Baldwin.
Sutton, 220 pp., £20, July 2007, 978 0 7509 4335 2
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... seems to possess an instinctive understanding of the rules of anagnorisis, which thinkers since Aristotle have made such a fuss about. The audience must be allowed their moment of truth in which their eyes are at last opened. The whole process exposes how precious and fragile is our command of identity, and how rough and physical are our methods of ...

The French are not men

Michael Wood: L’affaire Dreyfus, 7 September 2017

Lettres à la marquise: correspondance inédite avec Marie Arconati Visconti 
by Alfred Dreyfus, edited by Philippe Oriol.
Grasset, 592 pp., £19, March 2017, 978 2 246 85965 9
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... groan, keep quiet, have supper and forget’ – and offers a brilliant aphorism of her own: ‘If Aristotle provided a good definition of man in calling him a “political animal”, the French are not men, they are artists.’ Of course this climate had its effect on the case – mainly that of slowing everything down. In September 1905 – six years after ...

Dreadful Apprehensions

Clare Bucknell: Collier and Fielding, 25 October 2018

The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable 
by Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier, edited by Carolyn Woodward.
Kentucky, 406 pp., £86.50, November 2017, 978 0 8131 7410 5
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... that he had ‘entirely changed his opinion’ after finding a version of her point in Aristotle. The female members of the Cry, meanwhile, are suspicious and envious in equal measure. They mutter bitterly about ‘wits, women of sense, pretenders to penetration, &c.’, insist that ‘learning ever was, and ever would be, the ruin of all women who ...

Unicorn or Narwhal?

Lorraine Daston: Linnaeus makes the rules, 22 February 2024

The Man Who Organised Nature: The Life of Linnaeus 
by Gunnar Broberg, translated by Anna Paterson.
Princeton, 484 pp., £35, July 2023, 978 0 691 21342 2
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... Since the 16th century, they had constructed genealogies of their predecessors reaching back to Aristotle and Theophrastus.Linnaeus seems to have invested these substitute family ties with an emotional intensity that went well beyond figures of speech. Broberg estimates that Linnaeus’s household consisted of about twenty people, including his wife, Sara ...

The Contingency of Language

Richard Rorty, 17 April 1986

... the moral vocabulary of St Paul as against that of Freud, the jargon of Newton versus that of Aristotle, the idiom of Blake rather than that of Dryden – it is difficult to think of the world as making one of these better than another, of the world as deciding between them. When the notion of ‘description of the world’ is moved from the level of ...

Point of Wonder

A.D. Nuttall, 5 December 1991

Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World 
by Stephen Greenblatt.
Oxford, 202 pp., £22.50, September 1991, 0 19 812382 5
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... in wonder’ to Socrates. Did Socrates ever say this? Surely the famous and influential passage is Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982b, which Greenblatt ought to have been aware of since in another place he quotes an immediately relevant observation by Albertus Magnus, from his Commentary on the Metaphysics. The irony is deep indeed. In a book about intrepid voyagers ...

Faith, Hope and Probability

Mary Douglas, 23 May 1991

The Taming of Chance 
by Ian Hacking.
Cambridge, 264 pp., £27.50, November 1990, 0 521 38014 6
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... he is fair enough in recognising that the association between the mean and the good goes back to Aristotle, he relies on his nose for smelling out improper use of statistics. Normal and Pathological Having a joke about the public monuments is one thing, defacing them is quite another. Durkheim’s image in Western sociology has already been rudely scrawled ...

The Miller’s Tale

J.B. Trapp, 4 November 1993

Erasmus: His Life, Work and Influence 
by Cornelis Augustijn, translated by J.C. Grayson.
Toronto, 239 pp., £16.25, February 1991, 0 8020 5864 7
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Erasmus: A Critical Biography 
by Léon-E. Halkin, translated by John Tonkin.
Blackwell, 360 pp., £45, December 1992, 0 631 16929 6
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Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print 
by Lisa Jardine.
Princeton, 278 pp., £19.95, June 1993, 0 691 05700 1
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... found time to expound the Lord’s Prayer, minor works of Prudentius and pseudo-Ovid, to preface Aristotle, and much more. No wonder Erasmus died famous, easy in circumstances as in the knowledge – or complacency, to be censorious about it – that he had kept his personal freedom, living by his pen, applying himself with more than human industry to his ...

At the Fairground

Tom Nairn, 20 March 1997

Republics, Nations and Tribes 
by Martin Thom.
Verso, 359 pp., £45, July 1995, 1 85984 020 5
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... antiquity, and enjoyed a common high culture measured primarily in terms of familiarity with Aristotle, Stoicism and the chronicles of Republican Rome. One crucial element of the remote models which informed this extraordinary mentalité lay in their being organised not by nation but by city-state. Hence Thom’s title, which denotes an ideological ...