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R.J. Berry, 21 February 1985

Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology 
HMSO, 103 pp., £6.40Show More
Human Procreation: Ethical Aspects of the New Techniques 
Oxford, 91 pp., £3.95, December 1984, 0 19 857608 0Show More
The Redundant Male 
by Jeremy Cherfas and John Gribbin.
Bodley Head, 197 pp., £9.95, May 1984, 9780370305233
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Begotten of Made? Human Procreation and Medical Technique 
by Oliver O’Donovan.
Oxford, 88 pp., £2.50, June 1984, 0 19 826678 2
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... to the fears articulated in Brave New World. This last viewpoint is argued lucidly and forcibly by Oliver O’Donovan, Regius Professor of Moral Theology at Oxford, in Begotten or Made?, originally given as the 1983 London Lectures in Contemporary Christianity. O’Donovan’s main theme is that there are limits to the proper use and function of the human ...

With Only Passing Reference to the Earth

James Hamilton-Paterson: The Martian Enterprise, 22 August 2002

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World 
by Oliver Morton.
Fourth Estate, 351 pp., £18.99, June 2002, 9781841156682
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... In his introduction to this remarkable book, Oliver Morton writes that it is ‘about how ideas from our full and complex planet are projected onto the rocks of that simpler, empty one’. Projection, Morton believes, has determined our thinking about Mars from the outset. The planet had attracted its complement of myth well before the Milanese astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli made his new map of Mars in 1877, and its features, dimly discernible through inadequate telescopes and often obscured by dust storms, had already acquired fanciful names ...

Mainly Puddling

Stefan Collini: Thomas Carlyle’s Excesses, 14 December 2023

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle: Vol. 50, December 1875-February 1881 
edited by Ian Campbell.
Duke, 211 pp., $30, October 2022, 978 1 4780 2054 7
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... By​ 1875 the eighty-year-old Thomas Carlyle was ready to die. In fact, he was rather looking forward to death, at least officially, more than once referring to it as ‘release’. To judge by the sixty letters to his brother that Carlyle wrote (or, rather, dictated, his own hand having become too unsteady) between December 1875 and March 1879, there was much to be released from ...

Shades of Peterloo

Ferdinand Mount: Indecent Government, 7 July 2022

Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London 
by Vic Gatrell.
Cambridge, 451 pp., £25, May, 978 1 108 83848 1
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... hundred desperate stockingers and miners in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire were persuaded by ‘Oliver the spy’ to march on London to join a promised armed uprising. They were swiftly surrounded by forewarned troops and arrested at the village of Pentrich. Three of the Pentrich men suffered the traditional penalty for treason: hanging and ...

‘Wondered at as an owl’

Blair Worden: Cromwell’s Bad Idea, 7 February 2002

Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution 
by Christopher Durston.
Manchester, 270 pp., £15.99, May 2001, 0 7190 6065 6
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... Among the objects of hatred and ridicule in English memory the regime of Oliver Cromwell’s Major-Generals has a towering place. The division of the country, in 1655, into 12 districts administered by killjoy Puritan commanders was a brief episode, in effect lasting less than a year, but it has been reviled and derided from that time to this ...

Lost Jokes

Alan Bennett, 2 August 1984

... it would have been just as effective. Getting On is an account of a middle-aged Labour MP, George Oliver, so self-absorbed that he remains blind to the fact that his wife is having an affair with the handyman, his mother-in-law is dying, his son is getting ready to leave home, his best friend thinks him a fool and that to ...

Cleaning up

Simon Schaffer, 1 July 1982

Explaining the Unexplained: Mysteries of the Paranormal 
by Hans Eysenck and Carl Sargent.
Weidenfeld, 192 pp., £9.95, April 1982, 0 297 78068 9
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Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts 
by R.C. Finucane.
Junction, 292 pp., £13.50, May 1982, 0 86245 043 8
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Hauntings and Apparitions 
by Andrew Mackenzie.
Heinemann, 240 pp., £8.50, June 1982, 0 434 44051 5
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Beyond the Body: An Investigation of Out-of-the-Body Experiences 
by Susan Blackmore.
Heinemann, 270 pp., £8.50, June 1982, 0 434 07470 5
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... Balfour, from J.J. Thomson (discoverer of the electron) and from the distinguished physicists Oliver Lodge and Balfour Stewart. Since then the links between scientific heroes and psychical research have always been close. In his foreword to the two books, by Mackenzie and Blackmore, published to celebrate the Society’s centenary, Brian Inglis recalls ...

His Friends Were Appalled

Deborah Friedell: Dickens, 5 January 2012

The Life of Charles Dickens 
by John Forster.
Cambridge, 1480 pp., £70, December 2011, 978 1 108 03934 5
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Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist 
by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.
Harvard, 389 pp., £20, October 2011, 978 0 674 05003 7
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Charles Dickens: A Life 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 527 pp., £30, October 2011, 978 0 670 91767 9
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... but won’t be seduced. She won’t follow Forster, who ‘like most biographers … was too ready to invest his subject with all the virtues’. Tomalin’s Dickens is the consummate Victorian – that is, a hypocrite. He created a charity to reform prostitutes, to which he was devoted, though all along, Tomalin suggests, he may have slept with ...

It starts with an itch

Alan Bennett: ‘People’, 8 November 2012

... As a boy, though, for me its most numinous holding was a large felt hat reputed to be that of Oliver Cromwell with a bullet hole in the crown to prove it. Visiting Temple Newsam was always a treat, as it still is more than half a century later. Back in 1947, though, with the country in the throes of the postwar economic crisis, the push was on for more ...

May ’88

Douglas Johnson, 21 April 1988

Les Sept Mitterrand 
by Catherine Nay.
Grasset, 286 pp., frs 96, September 1988, 2 246 36291 1
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France Today 
by John Ardagh.
Secker, 647 pp., £22.50, October 1987, 0 436 01746 6
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Jacques Chirac 
by Franz-Oliver Giesbert.
Seuil, 455 pp., frs 125, April 1987, 2 02 009771 0
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Monsieur Barre 
by Henri Amouroux.
Laffont, 584 pp., frs 125, June 1986, 2 221 04954 3
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The Workers’ Movement 
by Alain Touraine, Michel Wieviorka and François Dubet, translated by Ian Patterson.
Cambridge/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 322 pp., £35, October 1987, 0 521 30852 6
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The State and the Market Economy: Industrial Patriotism and Economic Intervention in France 
by Jack Hayward.
Wheatsheaf, 267 pp., £32.50, December 1985, 0 7450 0012 6
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France under Recession 1981-86 
by John Tuppen.
Macmillan, 280 pp., £29.50, February 1988, 0 333 39889 0
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... and in the importance of the market. Each criticises the other on the grounds that he is too ready to look after his friends and to revive the old république des copains. Thus Chirac has claimed that in 1985 Mitterrand went back on his promise never to introduce proportional representation, and accused him of being an irresponsible politician, type ...

What’s this fork doing?

Andrea Brady: Alice Notley, 7 September 2023

Early Works 
by Alice Notley.
Fonograf, 321 pp., $20.95, February, 978 1 7378036 3 8
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The Speak Angel Series 
by Alice Notley.
Fonograf, 634 pp., $27.95, February, 978 1 7378036 2 1
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... to die for ‘the right to frivolity’. Notley is ‘a girl Samson in a pink/prom dress’, ready to pull down the temples of the avant-garde.Many of the poems in Early Works have a chatty, diurnal music that can also be heard in the work of Frank O’Hara or John Ashbery. Ashbery’s notion of the poem as ‘the chronicle of the creative act that ...

Chemical Common Sense

Miroslav Holub, 4 July 1996

The Same and Not the Same 
by Roald Hoffmann.
Columbia, 294 pp., $34.95, September 1995, 0 231 10138 4
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... Jay Gould, the books of Lewis Wolpert, Peter Medawar’s essays, the psychiatric narratives of Oliver Sacks or the clinical deliberations of Sherwin Nuland; and finally the heroic attempts to describe a single discipline, including its technical details and particular kind of reasoning. For inclusion in this category I would suggest Milton A. Rothman (The ...

African History without Africans

Basil Davidson: Portugal’s Empire, 18 February 1999

The Lusiads 
by Luí Vaz de Camões, translated by Landeg White.
Oxford, 258 pp., £6.99, October 1997, 0 19 283191 7
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Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War, 1961-1974 
by John Cann.
Greenwood, 216 pp., $59.95, February 1998, 0 313 30189 1
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The Decolonisation of Portuguese Africa 
by Norrie MacQueen.
Longman, 280 pp., £15.99, February 1998, 0 582 25993 2
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African Guerrillas 
edited by Christopher Clapham.
James Currey, 208 pp., £40, September 1998, 0 85255 815 5
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... sources. Reading MacQueen and Cann, I was sadly reminded of some remarks made by Roland Oliver. Looking back in 1997 over his long and influential career of academic and practical innovation in African historiography, Oliver felt obliged to note that ‘Europe seemed to be turning increasingly inwards’ to the ...

Ghost Ions

Jonathan Coe: AA-Rated Memories, 18 August 2022

Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems 
edited by Julian Upton.
Headpress, 595 pp., £22.99, April, 978 1 909394 93 3
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The Magic Box: Viewing Britain through the Rectangular Window 
by Rob Young.
Faber, 500 pp., £12.99, August, 978 0 571 28460 3
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... dust. Ghost ions float towards the inner surface of the glass.The watchers are out there, ready to receive.This evocation of television viewing as something charged, numinous and phantasmal will strike a chord with many British people of Young’s (and my) generation, the late baby boomers and early Generation X-ers. We all have flickering memories of ...

New Model Criticism

Colin Burrow: Writing Under Cromwell, 19 June 2008

Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham 
by Blair Worden.
Oxford, 458 pp., December 2007, 978 0 19 923081 5
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... of the purged Rump Parliament, the execution of Charles I, the dissolution of the Rump by Oliver Cromwell, the formation and collapse of Barebone’s Parliament, the Instrument of Government which established Cromwell as lord protector, the Humble Petition and Advice which made him king in more or less everything but name, the death of ...

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