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Coloured Spots v. Iridescence

Steven Rose: Evolutionary Inevitability, 22 March 2018

Improbable Destinies: How Predictable Is Evolution? 
by Jonathan Losos.
Allen Lane, 364 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 0 241 20192 3
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... The issue​ of evolutionary inevitability was brought sharply into focus by the late Stephen Jay Gould in his book Wonderful Life (1989). Gould discussed the bizarre fossils uncovered by the Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris in an outcrop of rock in the Canadian Rockies, known as the Burgess Shale. The shale was formed 511 million years ago, in the period when animal life was first emerging ...

Bunnymooning

Philip French, 6 June 1996

The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives 
by Sebastian Faulks.
Hutchinson, 309 pp., £16.99, April 1996, 0 09 179211 8
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... man; he once signed a piece ‘Jaye Wolfstein’, a pseudonym intended to evoke both Jay Gatsby and his Jewish underworld associate Meyer Wolfsheim. (Jeremy claimed to be partly Jewish on his father’s side and liked to be called J or Jay.) Another character who fascinated him was Whitaker Chambers, the ...

Swiping at Suburbs

Andrew Saint: The course of British urbanism, 31 March 2005

Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City 
by Tristram Hunt.
Weidenfeld, 432 pp., £25, June 2004, 0 297 60767 7
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... and Glasgow also enthral him. He is baffled by those like G.M. Trevelyan and, more recently, Peter Hall, who have found in the Victorian urban patchwork only muddle. Yet muddle there was, the reader is reminded, as idea locks horns with idea and style jostles with style. Take the marginal matter of style. The industrial cities were aware they amounted to ...

Forget the Klingons

James Hamilton-Paterson: Is there anybody out there?, 6 March 2003

Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life 
by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart.
Ebury, 369 pp., £17.99, September 2002, 0 09 187927 2
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XTL: Extraterrestrial Life and How to Find It 
by Simon Goodwin and John Gribbin.
Weidenfeld, 191 pp., £12.99, August 2002, 1 84188 193 7
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... contingency would guarantee that next time around it would not follow the same path. Stephen Jay Gould’s book Wonderful Life, about the fantastic evolutionary dead-ends fossilised in Canada’s Burgess Shale, makes this point beautifully. We and other land vertebrates owe our eyes-above-nose-above-mouth features and our awkwardly intersecting ...

Suppose the Archduke had ducked

Andrew Berry: Game theory and human evolution, 7 September 2000

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny 
by Robert Wright.
Little, Brown, 435 pp., £22.50, March 2000, 0 316 64485 4
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... products, and not in any general sense ‘better’ than even the lowliest bacterium. Stephen Jay Gould, in particular, has insisted that the anthropocentric Victorian perspective was fuelled more by theology than by sound biology. Like his pet theme, Spencer’s reputation, too, has been eclipsed. In the 1890s, he was well enough known to receive a ...

Fond Father

Dinah Birch: A Victorian Naturalist, 19 September 2002

Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse 1810-88 
by Ann Thwaite.
Faber, 387 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 571 19328 5
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... to have the cool exactitude of his father’s studies of the private lives of sea anemones. Peter Abbs’s introduction to the current Penguin edition, first published in 1983, accepts the memoir as a faithful record of what happened: ‘As a documentary record we know, from other sources, that most of the facts are accurate.’ This is very much the ...

First Puppet, Now Scapegoat

Inigo Thomas: Ass-Chewing in Washington, 30 November 2006

State of Denial: Bush at War 
by Bob Woodward.
Simon and Schuster, 560 pp., £18.99, October 2006, 0 7432 9566 8
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... When he says that he went to Crawford, Texas to interview George Bush, or that the retired general Jay Garner, briefly the head of Iraq’s post-invasion government, came over for breakfast at his place, he is emphasising his intimacy with those who talk to him. But in Plan of Attack he introduces himself in another way. He says that he regretted not pushing a ...

Higher Man

John Sutherland, 22 May 1997

The Turner Diaries 
by ‘Andrew Macdonald’.
National Vauguard Books, 211 pp., $12.95, May 1978, 0 937944 02 5
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... Rage and Betrayal, the highly prejudicial ABC programme of 12 April 1996, in which the newscaster Peter Jennings called McVeigh a ‘monster’ and cited passages from Pierce’s book. Parallels between bomb-making in The Turner Diaries and by McVeigh were made much of in Joseph Hartzler’s opening address to the jury. The only material evidence produced by ...

A Moustache Too Far

Danny Karlin: Melville goes under, 8 May 2003

Herman Melville: A Biography. Vol. II: 1851-91 
by Hershel Parker.
Johns Hopkins, 997 pp., £31, May 2002, 0 8018 6892 0
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... Independence, to its rise in the Revolution. Both Melville’s grandfathers, Thomas Melvill and Peter Gansevoort, were Revolutionary heroes – Thomas for being among the Sons of Liberty who defied the colonial tax-gatherers in the Boston Tea Party in 1773, Peter for withstanding a British siege in 1777 (after which he ...

The Last War of Religion

David Armitage, 9 June 1994

The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World 
by J.C.D. Clark.
Cambridge, 404 pp., £35, October 1993, 0 521 44510 8
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The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Anti-Federalist Speeches, Articles and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification. Vol. I 
edited by Bernard Bailyn.
Library of America, 1214 pp., $35, July 1993, 0 940450 42 9
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... only sectarianism sufficed to explain the American rebels’ appalling disobedience. The loyalist Peter Oliver, writing in exile in London in 1781, detected the rebellion’s roots in the ‘Anarchy of Sentiment’ produced by the English Reformation, and stirred up by the doctrines peddled by the ‘black Regiment’ of Massachusetts clergy. The loyalist ...

Diary

Jonathan Lethem: My Marvel Years, 15 April 2004

... living together and sometimes apart, and each of them with lovers.Luke had an older brother, Peter, whom both Luke and I idealised in absentia. Peter had left behind a collection of 1960s Marvel comics in sacrosanct box files. These included a nearly complete run of The Fantastic Four, the famous 102 issues drawn by ...

Avoid the Orient

Colm Tóibín: The Ghastly Paul Bowles, 4 January 2007

Paul Bowles: A Life 
by Virginia Spencer Carr.
Peter Owen, 431 pp., £19.95, July 2005, 0 7206 1254 3
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... gave me the original impetus to consider the possibility of writing a novel’. In 1985, he told Jay McInerney: ‘I got really interested in the whole process, and thought, I wish I had written this book. I started writing stories about two years after she published her novel.’ He translated Sartre’s Huis Clos and Borges’s story ‘The Circular ...

Act One, Scene One

David Bromwich: Don’t Resist, Oppose, 16 February 2017

... Michelle Obama said she had never heard talk like that and the right blogosphere dug up some ugly Jay Z lyrics and linked to Jay Z’s invitation to the Obama White House – there was no telling what might happen next. Post-election, the liberal argument veered away from Trump and turned to the important question of whom ...

The Biggest Rockets

Alex Ross: Gustav Mahler, 24 August 2000

Gustav Mahler. Vol. III. Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion (1904 to 1907) 
by Henry-Louis de La Grange.
Oxford, 1024 pp., £35, February 1999, 9780193151604
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The Mahler Companion 
edited by Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson.
Oxford, 652 pp., £50, May 1999, 0 19 816376 2
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... of three books about Mahler, has edited a new one, The Mahler Companion. Two other biographies, by Peter Franklin and Jonathan Carr, have recently appeared. And, of course, there are recordings – well over a thousand versions of twenty works. A Mahler Discography, published in 1995, is already thoroughly out of date. One starts to wonder: is there such a ...

On the Way to First Base

R.W. Johnson, 17 October 1996

... pushes through privatisation in the face of a transport strike while the former trade-union leader Jay Naidoo’s old cronies stand appalled at his talk, as Minister of Telecommunications, of privatisation. Ronnie Kasrils, the Deputy Minister of Defence, speaks of the urgent need for rearmament – which means spending billions on corvettes, submarines and jet ...

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