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Fraser MacDonald: What does a degree mean?, 29 June 2023

... bypass the boycott, tipping universities into a state of dysfunction. Some final-year students may not graduate this summer; others will ‘graduate’ without their assessments being marked, or even read – including capstone assessments such as dissertations. If marks don’t matter, what is an examination system for? What does a degree mean? At the ...

Who needs smoothies?

Liam Shaw: Hold on to your teeth, 17 April 2025

Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans 
by Bill Schutt.
Algonquin, 320 pp., $24.99, August 2024, 978 1 64375 178 8
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... large body parts without a clear functional purpose (like a peacock’s tail), but the tusk may have its uses: recent drone footage appears to show narwhals stunning fish with a quick sabre-rap. Alternatively, some scientists have suggested that, being stuffed with nerve bundles, the tusk may sense changes in water ...

Minimalism

David Pears, 19 February 1987

A.J. Ayer 
by John Foster.
Routledge, 307 pp., £12, October 1985, 9780710206022
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Voltaire 
by A.J. Ayer.
Weidenfeld, 182 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 297 78880 9
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Fact, Science and Morality: Essays on A.J. Ayer’s ‘Language, Truth and Logic’ 
edited by Graham Macdonald and Crispin Wright.
Blackwell, 314 pp., £27.50, January 1987, 0 631 14555 9
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... makes it almost impossible to combine accuracy and accessibility. The technicalities of philosophy may not be as great as those of science, but they are enough to put much of what is written beyond the reach of most people. Even etnics, which touches our lives more closely than any other branch of philosophy, is now developing formidable intricacies, and in ...

Who needs nuclear weapons?

Philip Towle, 27 October 1988

Without the Bomb: The Politics of Nuclear Non-Proliferation 
by Mitchell Reiss.
Columbia, 337 pp., $35, January 1988, 0 231 06438 1
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Deep Black: The Secrets of Space Espionage 
by William Burrows.
Bantam, 401 pp., £14.95, January 1988, 0 593 01342 5
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Democracy and Deterrence: The History and Future of Nuclear Strategy 
by Philip Bobbitt.
Macmillan, 350 pp., £29.50, March 1988, 0 333 43537 0
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... But in any case the spread of nuclear knowledge will continue inexorably. Furthermore, it may be that some states will feel less confidence in the nuclear guarantees given to them by the super-powers, and thus that they have to have their own nuclear weapons, if détente becomes firmer. Mitchell Reiss’s thoughtful analysis of the political and ...

War Crimes

Michael Byers: The limits of self-defence, 17 August 2006

... jus in bello, also known as ‘international humanitarian law’, limiting the way belligerents may behave once a conflict has begun. The 1945 UN Charter prohibits the use or threat of force against the ‘territorial integrity or political independence’ of nation-states. The right of self-defence constitutes an exception to this general prohibition ...

At the National Gallery

Nicholas Penny: El Greco, 4 March 2004

... drawing’. In 1867 Robinson tried in vain to sell an important El Greco to the gallery. In May 1895, not long after Layard died, he offered the Expulsion of the Traders from the Temple, justly observing to the new director, Sir Edward Poynter, that ‘it is very much above the average of this most eccentric master’s works and has the advantage of ...

From Wilfred Owen 1918

Patricia Beer, 2 November 1995

... My hand is warm Enough to write DECEASED on those I led. Dearest of Mothers, I Begin to think I may not die. The war is drawing to a close, My own sweet Mother. Monday’s dead May be the last. That crimson stain Has turned to sepia.                     I remain Ever your loving ...

London

Frederick Seidel, 11 March 2010

... helps People leave this world won’t. If you’re that medicated and out of it and desperate, You may not be thinking right about wanting to end your life. If you’re near death, you may be too near For the clinic to help you over the barrier. She weakly screams she wants to die. Hard to believe her pain is beyond the ...

Eliot at smokefall

Barbara Everett, 24 January 1985

... with the present public image of the literary. The problems of Tom and Viv are more obvious, and may be dealt with more rapidly. They start from the fact that drama is an art of embodiment, and always highlights any errors of thinking by objectifying them. One such was revealed the moment Hastings’s curtain went up on a tea-party in the garden of Viv’s ...

Auden Askew

Barbara Everett, 19 November 1981

W.H. Auden: A Biography 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Allen and Unwin, 495 pp., £12.50, June 1981, 0 04 928044 9
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Early Auden 
by Edward Mendelson.
Faber, 407 pp., £10, September 1981, 0 571 11193 9
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... of books or of reality, better in the sense of ‘truer’, more accurate and more revealing: and may well be helped to be so by being rid of the illusion that as ‘scholars’ they have some easy, advantaged road to the truth.This myth of scholarship seems extra liable to crop up where the lives of poets are concerned, and not necessarily because (or not ...

Whirligig

Barbara Everett: Thinking about Hamlet, 2 September 2004

... as looking like Hamlet’s aunt, and this must have made sense to most of his readers). We may therefore conclude that this is our culture’s leading night out: even in an electronic age, one of the best shows going. But it’s worth recalling that the word ‘show’ took on precisely this usage only late in the 19th century. When Shakespeare says of ...

On Giving Up

Adam Phillips, 6 January 2022

... walk. When we want to turn back the clock we are not giving up on time. Turning back, in short, may involve reconsideration; giving up suggests abandonment (and if we really give up there is no turning back). Both are reversals of a kind, expressions of doubt about progress and desire, or at least about direction and purpose. So it is essentially an anxiety ...
... method, the theory of exploitation, a theory relating class interest to state policy, and what one may refer to as a theory of endogenous belief formation. These do not form a fully coherent theory, but a loosely integrated whole, with much scope for further development. Marx’s methodological views form a confused and confusing amalgam of profound insights ...

A Car of One’s Own

Andrew O’Hagan: Chariots of Desire, 11 June 2009

... of Linwood. When people consider their own lives and how well they have done, or are doing, they may well think of the cars they have owned, the notion of aspiration having a lot to do with what you drive; and if that is the case, then the almost permanent decline of the car industry in Britain must be fairly closely entangled with our sense of who we ...

Peeping Tam

Karl Miller, 6 August 1981

... the language question has been seen by compatriots as a measure of his Scottish patriotism: but it may well be more significant of his attitude to class. Not only nationality but also, and perhaps more especially, class were at issue in the choice he faced between Scots and English, and were expressed in the accommodations he reached between the two in forming ...

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