More than Machines

Steven Shapin: Man or Machine?, 1 December 2016

The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick 
by Jessica Riskin.
Chicago, 544 pp., £30, March 2016, 978 0 226 30292 8
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... in terms of material substrates, it’s been asked ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ – though Thomas Nagel’s famous essay of 1974 wasn’t really about the consciousness or sensory world of bats but about the consciousness and sensibilities of reductionist philosophers. (Nagel’s answer: we don’t know, and we certainly aren’t on the way to knowing ...

Catastrophism

Steven Shapin: The Pseudoscience Wars, 8 November 2012

The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe 
by Michael Gordin.
Chicago, 291 pp., £18.50, October 2012, 978 0 226 30442 7
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... weren’t scientists at all or whose scientific credentials had been burnished by the political powers. And there were the McCarthyite witch-hunts, some of which targeted distinguished scientists. How much autonomy did American scientists actually have? How vulnerable was that autonomy to the dictates of politicians and to the delusions of popular ...

Clubs of Quidnuncs

John Mullan, 17 February 2000

The Dunciad in Four Books 
by Alexander Pope, edited by Valerie Rumbold.
Longman, 456 pp., £55, August 1999, 0 582 08924 7
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... are peculiarly well-read, you might also spot the surprising rebirth of lines by the Cavalier poet Thomas Carew addressed to his beloved: Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past, the fading rose: For in your Beauty’s orient deep, These flowers as in their causes, sleep. Appropriate in its strange way: Carew’s essence of beauty is the ...

Unhoused

Terry Eagleton: Anonymity, 22 May 2008

Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature 
by John Mullan.
Faber, 374 pp., £17.99, January 2008, 978 0 571 19514 5
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... the infinite merge in the act of imaginative creation. To surrender oneself to dark, unknowable powers is to become all the more uniquely oneself. One must lose one’s life in order to find it. For one strain of Modernism, by contrast, the self is displaced by the very forces which constitute it – unhoused, scooped out, decentred and dispossessed. We are ...

Inside the Barrel

Brent Hayes Edwards: The French Slave Trade, 10 September 2009

Memoires des esclavages: la fondation d’un centre national pour la memoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions 
by Edouard Glissant.
Gallimard, 192 pp., €14.90, May 2007, 978 2 07 078554 4
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The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade 
by Christopher Miller.
Duke, 571 pp., £20.99, March 2008, 978 0 8223 4151 2
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... writing about the Atlantic as a site of cultural contact and confrontation between the European powers. Nevertheless, many of Miller’s examples involve encounters between empires, and patterns of influence that cross the language barrier. As The French Atlantic Triangle makes clear, the translations of a number of English texts – for instance, Aphra ...

Highlight of Stay So Far

Stefan Collini: Beckett’s Letters, 1 December 2016

The Letters of Samuel Beckett Vol. IV: 1966-89 
edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck.
Cambridge, 838 pp., £29.99, September 2016, 978 0 521 86796 2
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... defences were in place in advance: ‘All is I suppose as well as can be expected by one with my powers of expectation.’ Thus armoured, he could allow himself to send his version of a cheery wave from holiday in Italy: ‘Nothing to tell that’s not better untold. Aches worse than in Paris, weather filthy.’ The line between stoicism and vindication ...

Devouring the pangolin

John Sutherland, 25 October 1990

The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History 
by Robert Darnton.
Faber, 393 pp., £25, September 1990, 0 571 14423 3
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... in this period – Simon Schama’s Citizens and Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers – which reached a mass non-professorial audience. Kennedy’s book has, in fact, had a profound influence on political thinking in the United States. But what is more striking is Darnton’s own reaction to the ‘monographism’ which he perceived as ...

Upper Ireland

Nicholas Canny, 16 March 1989

Modern Ireland 1600-1972 
by R.F. Foster.
Allen Lane, 688 pp., £18.95, October 1988, 0 7139 9010 4
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... of the literature of contemporary social analysis ranging from that composed by Fynes Moryson and Thomas Dineley in the 17th century through that written by Charles O’Conor and Sir Jonah Barrington in the 18th, and forward to that executed by Conrad Arensberg and Rosemary Harris in the present century. Due acknowledgement is made by Dr Foster whenever he ...

High Punctuation

Christopher Ricks, 14 May 1992

But I digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse 
by John Lennard.
Oxford, 324 pp., £35, November 1991, 0 19 811247 5
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... It is a great strength of Lennard’s book that he does not allow any one of those four powers, ‘practice, art, method or system’, to lord it over the others; his argument depends on his keeping all four in play, referring to all, deferring to none, and leaving it to them to settle their differences. It is an allied strength that he takes so ...

Protestant Guilt

Tom Paulin, 9 April 1992

Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being 
by Ted Hughes.
Faber, 517 pp., £18.99, March 1992, 0 571 16604 0
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... point in a little-noticed passage in an essay called ‘Whether genius is conscious of its powers’, where he argues that ‘the stimulus of writing is like the stimulus of intoxication’: ‘While we are engaged in any work, we are thinking of the subject, and cannot stop to admire ourselves; and when it is done, we look at it with comparative ...

Make the music mute

John Barrell, 9 July 1992

English Music 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Hamish Hamilton, 400 pp., £14.99, May 1992, 0 241 12501 4
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... as an astrologer. Timothy goes to work once more as his father’s assistant, and soon the healing powers return. The family firm prospers until Timothy, whose low-key sexual awakening is beginning to make him curious about the world, decides to leave home again, and to finance his further education (he wants to study English literature) by working nights in a ...

Prinney, Boney, Boot

Roy Porter, 20 March 1986

The English Satirical Print 1600-1832 
edited by Michael Duffy.
Chadwyck-Healey, February 1986
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... overwhelmingly those of a particular constituency, the metropolitan bourgeoisie. Thus, as Peter Thomas shows, the prints of the American crisis express many views – e.g. hostility to the Stamp Act – which are clearly those of London’s mercantile communities, but which it would be question-begging to attribute to the political nation at large. The same ...

Visions

Charles Townshend, 19 April 1984

Theobald Wolfe Tone: Colonial Outsider 
by Tom Dunne.
Tower Books, 77 pp., $1.90, December 1982, 0 902568 07 8
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Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France 
by Marianne Elliott.
Yale, 411 pp., £15, November 1982, 0 03 000270 2
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De Valera and the Ulster Question 1917-1973 
by John Bowman.
Oxford, 369 pp., £17.50, November 1982, 0 19 822681 0
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Sean Lemass and the Making of Modern Ireland 
by Paul Bew and Henry Patterson.
Gill, 224 pp., £15, November 1982, 0 7171 1260 8
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... from idealistic internationalism into chauvinistic imperialism. The hostility of the other great powers, culminating in the Second Coalition in 1798, made survival the sole priority. Members of the United Irish embassy to France ran the risk – to which, as Dunne shows, Tone succumbed – of internalising French priorities. French doctrine predisposed the ...

Total Solutions

Alan Brinkley, 18 July 1985

The Heavy Dancers 
by E.P. Thompson.
Merlin, 340 pp., £12.50, March 1985, 0 85036 328 4
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Star Wars: Self-Destruct Incorporated 
by E.P. Thompson and Ben Thompson.
Merlin, 71 pp., £1, May 1985, 0 85036 334 9
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... in World War Two, a lengthy and somewhat mawkish critical assessment of the American radical poet Thomas McGrath (whose work ‘will be remembered in one hundred years when many more fashionable voices have been forgotten’), another, better tribute to C. Wright Mills, snatches of Thompson’s own, unimpressive poetry, and, apparently, virtually everything ...

Consider Jack and Oskar

Michael Rossi: Twin Studies, 7 February 2013

Born Together – Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study 
by Nancy Segal.
Harvard, 410 pp., £39.95, June 2012, 978 0 674 05546 9
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... variation.’ Segal spent three years first as a postdoctoral fellow under the study’s director, Thomas Bouchard, and then as the assistant director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research. Her book answers critics of Mistra who argue, as Joseph Jay did in the American Journal of Psychology in 2001, that ‘the studies of separated twins ...