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The Case for Negative Thinking

V.S. Pritchett, 20 March 1980

Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in his Context 
by Marilyn Butler.
Routledge, 361 pp., £10.95, October 1979, 0 7100 0293 9
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... a top examinee and an important official at the age of 30 in the East India Office, sitting beside John StuartMill and Bentham. There he is, convulsing the office with his stories and talk, and yet he inaugurates the first steamboat service to India. The amateur becomes the professional. The steamboats were an ...

Room for the Lambs

Elizabeth Spelman: Sexual equality, 26 January 2006

Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws 
by Catharine MacKinnon.
Harvard, 558 pp., £25.95, March 2005, 0 674 01540 1
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... she knew it to have arisen. Though she would not want to be caught in a political dalliance with John StuartMill, MacKinnon would surely second his claim that ‘the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal.’ But MacKinnon is not without concern that many women suffer from ...

Ways of Being Interesting

Theo Tait: Ian McEwan, 11 September 2014

The Children Act 
by Ian McEwan.
Cape, 215 pp., £16.99, September 2014, 978 0 224 10199 8
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... reach’: she is an excellent pianist; she knows her Shakespeare, her Adam Smith and her John StuartMill. Like Henry Perowne in Saturday, she is enlightened and honourable: a quietly heroic technocrat who brings ‘reasonableness to hopeless situations’, a liberal-paternalist superego figure who sorts ...

Do fight, don’t kill

Susan Pedersen: Wartime Objectors, 20 October 2022

Battles of Conscience: British Pacifists and the Second World War 
by Tobias Kelly.
Chatto, 367 pp., £22, May 2022, 978 1 78474 394 9
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Practical Utopia: The Many Lives of Dartington Hall 
by Anna Neima.
Cambridge, 313 pp., £75, April 2022, 978 1 316 51797 0
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... John StuartMill​ approved of dissent. In ‘On Liberty’, he argued that vigorous debate improved society and that unconventional behaviour lit the path to freer and more fulfilling lives. He urged the widest tolerance for opinion, speech and even what he charmingly called ‘experiments of living ...

Inventor

Richard Luckett, 21 December 1989

I.A. Richards: His Life and Work 
by John Paul Russo.
Routledge, 843 pp., £40, May 1989, 0 415 03134 6
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... grounded in that of Wordsworth and, to a far greater extent, Coleridge? His debts to Bentham and Mill, even to Arnold, were largely those of a debater who picks up whatever may usefully be gleaned from the other side of a discussion which, in Coleridge on the Imagination, he deliberately took back to first principles. The man who, at the onset of his ...

Globalisation before Globalisation

Philippe Marlière: The Paris Commune, 2 July 2015

Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871 
by John Merriman.
Yale, 324 pp., £20, October 2014, 978 0 300 17452 6
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Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune 
by Kristin Ross.
Verso, 148 pp., £16.99, March 2015, 978 1 78168 839 7
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... Others describe it as one among many manifestations of French republicanism. The Yale historian John Merriman’s new book concentrates on the chain of events that created the Commune, and the main players behind its formation. He opens with a description of Paris in 1870: its western side a playground for the rich, the east an overpopulated slum. The class ...
The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age 
by Gertrude Himmelfarb.
Faber, 595 pp., £20, March 1984, 0 571 13177 8
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... Victorian Minds, presented a throng of thinkers, in a celebration of cerebration. And her study of John StuartMill suggested that different states of mind might dwell within the same body. The result of this approach is a rich and unusual brand of intellectual history: more interested in the typical and representative ...

What’s the big idea?

Jonathan Parry: The Origins of Our Decline, 30 November 2017

The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914 
by Simon Heffer.
Random House, 912 pp., £30, September 2017, 978 1 84794 742 0
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... decadence, and can’t be understood through the writings of Fabian intellectuals or the plays of John Galsworthy.Heffer isn’t interested in new scholarship on the period unless it’s biographical. Hardly a page of this book is informed by developments in historical thinking since the 1970s; he makes his case using whatever materials come to hand most ...

Extra-Legal

Stephen Sedley, 19 October 1995

Overcoming Law 
by Richard Posner.
Harvard, 597 pp., £29.95, March 1995, 0 674 64925 7
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... underlying, law on which economics have no purchase; here, he says: ‘I take my stand with the John StuartMill of On Liberty (1859), the classic statement of classical liberalism. On Liberty argues that every person is entitled to the maximum liberty – both personal and economic – consistent with the liberty of ...

Dr Küng’s Fiasco

Alasdair MacIntyre, 5 February 1981

Does God exist? 
by Hans Küng, translated by Edward Quinn.
Collins, 839 pp., £12, November 1980, 0 00 215147 2
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... with Dr Küng is a little like chiding the Third International for not adopting the principles of John StuartMill in its dealings with Lukacs. And when therefore John Paul II – who, like Evelyn Waugh, as Randolph Churchill remarked to an earlier Pope, is himself a Roman Catholic ...

Diary

Tim Dee: Twitching, 11 March 2010

... about birds and had much to tell us on subjects ranging from the fossil avifauna of Britain to John Clare’s poetic bird tally. A naturalist and conservationist, he had previously written the most detailed biography imaginable of the fulmar; was one of the editors of the New Naturalist Library; and regularly appeared on the BBC. The Shell book covers ...

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
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... way absorbed the classical liberal precepts associated with the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke: adherence to limited government, respect for personal liberty and the sanctity of private property. Americans hadn’t needed a revolution of the French kind to win these freedoms: the country had gained autonomy from Britain without having to ...

Who digs the mines?

Andrew Liu: Chinese Exclusion, 21 July 2022

The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics 
by Mae Ngai.
Norton, 440 pp., £21.99, September 2021, 978 0 393 63416 7
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... in San Francisco published a pamphlet taking issue with claims made by California’s governor, John Bigler, who had characterised the state’s 7520 Chinese migrants as servile ‘coolies’ undercutting white workers. ‘The poor Chinaman does not come here as a slave,’ Tong Achick and Chun Aching wrote in An Analysis of the Chinese Question. ‘He ...

I now, I then

Thomas Keymer: Life-Writing, 17 August 2017

AHistory of English Autobiography 
edited by Adam Smyth.
Cambridge, 437 pp., £64.99, June 2016, 978 1 107 07841 3
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... the Oxford English Dictionary’s hundred most frequently cited authorities (one spot ahead of John Donne) for the earliest evidence of a word. He probably got this one from the German; it doesn’t seem to show up in French until 1820. Soon autobiography was everywhere, and not in a good way. Or so it seemed to the editors of the Quarterly Review, who, as ...

Collapse of the Sofa Cushions

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 24 March 1994

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics 
by Isobel Armstrong.
Routledge, 545 pp., £35, October 1993, 0 415 03016 1
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The Woman Reader: 1837-1914 
by Kate Flint.
Oxford, 366 pp., £25, October 1993, 0 19 811719 1
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... the early work of Browning and Tennyson within the ‘two systems of concentric circles’, as John StuartMill described them, that radiated out from the radical Bentham and the conservative Coleridge. While Browning wrote for the Monthly Repository, edited by the Benthamite W.J. Fox, the young Tennyson associated ...

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