Search Results

Advanced Search

46 to 60 of 189 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Saintly Resonances

Lorraine Daston: Obliterate the self!, 31 October 2002

Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England 
by George Levine.
Chicago, 320 pp., £31.50, September 2002, 0 226 47536 0
Show More
Show More
... of self-annihilation as the price of knowledge – knowledge about nature, society and identity. Charles Darwin and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda in the novel of that title, the aesthete Walter Pater and the statistician Karl Pearson, the political economist Harriet Martineau and Dickens’s John Harmon in Our Mutual ...

Antidote to Marx

Colin Kidd: Oh, I know Locke!, 4 January 2024

America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life 
by Claire Rydell Arcenas.
Chicago, 265 pp., $25, October, 978 0 226 82933 3
Show More
Show More
... of 1678, English Whigs under the leadership of Shaftesbury unsuccessfully tried to exclude King Charles II’s Catholic brother, James, Duke of York, from the succession. Locke’s First Treatise was also a response to the posthumous publication in 1680 of Patriarcha by the early 17th-century royalist Sir Robert Filmer, which claimed that absolute monarchy ...

The Darwin Show

Steven Shapin, 7 January 2010

... biggest birthday party. On or around 12 February 2009 alone – the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, ‘Darwin Day’ – there were more than 750 commemorative events in at least 45 countries, and, on or around 24 November, there was another spate of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of ...

Father-Daughter Problems

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s Bad Daughters, 8 May 2008

The Lodger: Shakespeare in Silver Street 
by Charles Nicholl.
Allen Lane, 378 pp., £20, November 2007, 978 0 7139 9890 0
Show More
Show More
... English chronicle play look obsolete (goodbye Richards and Henrys, hello Lear and Cymbeline). For Charles Nicholl, however, another simultaneously personal and geopolitical factor has a bearing on the timing of King Lear: Shakespeare’s long-standing interest in France. The country whose king Cordelia marries and whose army she deploys in her attempt to ...

Freak Anatomist

John Mullan: Hilary Mantel, 1 October 1998

The Giant, O'Brien 
by Hilary Mantel.
Fourth Estate, 211 pp., £14.99, September 1998, 1 85702 884 8
Show More
Show More
... more so when we know that they would have been recognised as the extremities of the skeleton of ‘Charles O’Brien’, the Irish Giant. O’Brien’s skeleton was one of Hunter’s most famous specimens. From the first, there were dark stories about how it was obtained. Before the Anatomy Act of 1832, bodies had to be procured either from the hangman or by ...

Running out of Soil

Terry Eagleton: Bram Stoker and Irish Protestant Gothic, 2 December 2004

From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker 
by Paul Murray.
Cape, 356 pp., £18.99, July 2004, 0 224 04462 1
Show More
Show More
... what is known as Protestant Gothic. There is a fertile lineage of Gothic fiction in Ireland, from Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Even the Irish Protestant Iris Murdoch’s darkly fantastic fiction makes more sense when read against this ...

The Hemingway Crush

Theo Tait: Kevin Powers, 3 January 2013

The Yellow Birds 
by Kevin Powers.
Sceptre, 230 pp., £14.99, September 2012, 978 1 4447 5612 8
Show More
Show More
... for a vet’s war novel seems, if not unpatriotic, then at least peevish and small-minded,’ Ron Charles wrote in his Washington Post review, before gently hinting at the truth: that this is an interesting novel, and in many ways a good one, which is blighted by some very obvious weaknesses. The title comes from a ‘Traditional US Army Marching ...

Fixing it for heredity

Raymond Fancher, 9 November 1989

The Burt Affair 
by Robert Joynson.
Routledge, 347 pp., £25, August 1989, 9780415010399
Show More
Show More
... technique known as ‘factor analysis’ so as to minimise the contributions of his early mentor Charles Spearman while falsely accentuating his own; and that he had systematically abused his position as editor of the British Journal for Statistical Psychology. Hearnshaw concluded that Burt might have been an honourable person in his prime, but that he had ...

A Few Pitiful Traitors

David Drake: The French Resistance, 5 May 2016

Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance 
by Robert Gildea.
Faber, 593 pp., £20, September 2015, 978 0 571 28034 6
Show More
Occupation Trilogy: ‘La Place de l’etoile’, ‘The Night Watch’, ‘Ring Roads’ 
by Patrick Modiano, translated by Caroline Hillier, Patricia Wolf and Frank Wynne.
Bloomsbury, 336 pp., £18.99, August 2015, 978 1 4088 6790 7
Show More
Show More
... Two political forces​ dominated post-Liberation France: Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French and head of the provisional French government until January 1946; and the French Communist Party (PCF), at that point the biggest and most popular party in the country. As Robert Gildea explains in his perceptive new book, each constructed a myth about France’s behaviour during the war that served its own political interests; each claimed it had led the Resistance ...

The Great National Circus

Eric Foner: Punch-Ups in the Senate, 22 November 2018

The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War 
by Joanne Freeman.
Farrar, Straus, 450 pp., £20.99, September 2018, 978 0 374 15477 6
Show More
Show More
... strode into the Senate chamber shortly after the daily session had ended. Two days earlier, Charles Sumner, the Senate’s most outspoken critic of slavery, had delivered a five-hour speech, ‘The Crime against Kansas’. Sumner not only denounced the ‘rape’ of Kansas by pro-slavery forces, which had terrorised Northern settlers and sacked the town ...

Hush-Hush Boom-Boom

Charles Glass: Spymasters, 12 August 2021

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War – A Tragedy in Three Acts 
by Scott Anderson.
Picador, 576 pp., £20, February, 978 1 5290 4247 4
Show More
Show More
... servant), and officials of the agency would not go beyond that today.’In​ 1991, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced the End of the Cold War Bill to dismantle the CIA. ‘The time has come to ask, with the Cold War over, can we purge the vestiges of this struggle from our laws, our bureaucracy, and most importantly from our way of ...

Voyagers

James Paradis, 18 June 1981

Sir Joseph Banks 
by Charles Lyte.
David and Charles, 248 pp., £10.50, October 1980, 0 7153 7884 8
Show More
The Heyday of Natural History: 1820-1870 
by Lynn Barber.
Cape, 320 pp., £9.50, October 1980, 9780224014489
Show More
A Vision of Eden 
by Marianne North.
Webb and Bower, 240 pp., £8.95, October 1980, 0 906671 18 3
Show More
Show More
... of the professional scientist. In his Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830), Charles Babbage dismissed the amateur tradition of science as wholly inadequate to the serious advancement of scientific knowledge. As young men now applied themselves to the study of law, he argued, future scientists must devote themselves to the mastery of ...

Bits

Catherine Caufield, 18 May 1989

Three Scientists and their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information 
by Robert Wright.
Times, 324 pp., $18.95, April 1988, 0 8129 1328 0
Show More
Coming of Age in the Milky Way 
by Timothy Ferris.
Bodley Head, 495 pp., £14.95, May 1989, 0 370 31332 1
Show More
Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St John 
by Isaac Newton.
Modus Vivendi, 323 pp., £800
Show More
What do you care what other people think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character 
by Richard Feynman.
Unwin Hyman, 255 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 04 440341 0
Show More
Show More
... more radical view forward in the 1981 book Genes, Minds and Culture, in which he and his co-author Charles Lumsden tried to trace the influence of genes on human thought and culture as well as on basic human behaviour. Genes, Minds and Culture does not shrink from making bold assertions. It contains, for example, a series of elaborate mathematical equations ...

When big was beautiful

Nicholas Wade, 20 August 1992

Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research 
edited by Peter Galison and Bruce Helvy.
Stanford, 392 pp., $45, April 1992, 0 8047 1879 2
Show More
The Code of Codes 
edited by Daniel Kevles and Leroy Hood.
Harvard, 397 pp., £23.95, June 1992, 0 674 13645 4
Show More
Show More
... and Chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz. The idea was taken up instead by Charles DeLisi, a physicist and senior official at the Department of Energy, the patron agency of Los Alamos and the other nuclear weapons design labs. Los Alamos justified its interest as being to study how the genome responds to radiation. At that point, as ...

The Bloody Sixth

Joshua Brown: The Real Gangs of New York, 23 January 2003

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld 
by Herbert Asbury.
Arrow, 366 pp., £6.99, January 2003, 0 09 943674 4
Show More
Gangs of New York 
directed by Martin Scorsese.
December 2002
Show More
Show More
... of the day, a ‘dead rabbit’ meant a ‘very athletic, rowdy fellow’, and thanks to Daniel Cassidy of the New College of California we now know that this is an Anglicisation of the Irish phrase ‘dod raibead’, which has the same meaning. Along with sensational accounts of the Dead Rabbits’ exploits, the invented gang name outlasted the ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences