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Kith, Kin and Cuckoo

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, 5 December 1985

Lost Children: The Story of Adopted Children Searching for their Mothers 
by Polly Toynbee.
Hutchinson, 288 pp., £9.95, August 1985, 0 09 160440 0
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... kingdom,’ she says, suggests that adoption of alien offspring with alien genes is virtually unknown. A male gorilla acquiring a new female into his group will automatically kill off her offspring by a previous male. A lion acquiring a new pride will kill off all the young progeny of a previous male. The instinct appears to be to multiply your own ...

Super-Performers

Peter Laslett, 15 March 1984

Communiqué of the State Statistical Bureau of the People’s Republic of China on Major Figures in the 1982 Population Census 
Beijing, 6 pp., October 1982Show More
Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China 
by Judith Stacey.
California, 324 pp., £24.25, December 1983, 0 520 04825 3
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Long Lives: The Chinese Elderly and the Communist Revolution 
by Deborah Davis-Friedmann.
Harvard, 160 pp., £17, November 1983, 0 674 53860 9
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Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America’s Past 
by Carole Haber.
Cambridge, 181 pp., £17.50, May 1983, 9780521250962
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... record in 1981. Moreover, all this happened in a country where automatic computation was virtually unknown, and where, the Head of the Census informs us, over five million enumerators and over a million census supervisors had to be mobilised and trained. Computer analysis is now going on, using machinery which the United Nations has helped to provide. This ...

Mimmi’s Story

Wayne Koestenbaum, 11 May 1995

Enrico Caruso: My Father and My Family 
by Enrico Caruso and Andrew Farkas.
Amadeus, 724 pp., £29.99, May 1994, 0 931340 24 1
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... of the priority-hogging tenor. Enrico Caruso Jr’s mother, Ada Giachetti, listed as ‘n.n.’ (unknown) on his birth certificate, ran away with the father’s chauffeur, Cesare Romati, when the boy was still young, and so his only memory of the divine Ada was of an unknown woman appearing ‘at the top landing, the voile ...

Not Altogether Lost

James Hamilton-Paterson: The Tasaday, 19 June 2003

Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday 
by Robin Hemley.
Farrar, Straus, 352 pp., $25, May 2003, 0 374 17716 3
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... In June 1971 it was learned that a hitherto unknown tribe had been found living in the dense rainforest of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Reportedly, the group consisted of 27 members, spoke an unknown tongue and wore only leaves. Tentatively named Tasaday after a nearby mountain, they seemed to be exclusively hunter-gatherers who knew nothing of agriculture and used stone tools to dig for wild yams ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Bad Manners, 6 July 2000

... talk like that. The anthology, illustrated by Ronald Searle, has a charming dedication ‘to the Unknown Man whose photograph was found hidden in a copy of the Bazar Book of Decorum (1870)’.I don’t know if there’s a book of etiquette that deals with metropolitan literary life, but there ought at least to be a guide to subtlety. Rumour has it that ...

Pentecost

John Burnside, 19 June 2003

... taking the shape of a bird and entering his creatures one by one to bless them with new grace and unknown tongues. I never quite forgot the holy ghost I learned in school a spirit I would name and then abandon as we leave behind the words that children say in prayers a complex wish we think about for years and never tell other than when we walk out with a son ...

Two Prose Poems

John Ashbery, 20 July 2000

... drifted across the hairline horizon like a tribe of adults and children, all hastening toward some unknown destination. A crisp pounding. Done to your mother what? Are now the ... And so you understand it, she ... I. Once you get past the moralising a new winter twilight creeps into place. And a lot of guys just kind of live through it? Ossified soup, mortised ...

Barchester Popes

Douglas Johnson, 16 July 1981

The Popes and European Revolution 
by Owen Chadwick.
Oxford, 646 pp., £28, March 1981, 0 19 826919 6
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... an election which, from their point of view, was third or fourth-best, or with a Pope who was an unknown quantity. The most hostile accounts have been given of the election of Cardinal Ganganelli as Clement XIV. It occurred at a time when four Catholic powers, France, Spain, Portugal and Naples, were determined to have a Pope who would destroy the ...

Halifax hots up

Colin Burrow: Writing (and reading) charitably, 21 October 2004

Havoc, in Its Third Year 
by Ronan Bennett.
Bloomsbury, 244 pp., £16.99, September 2004, 0 7475 6249 0
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... was published a while after his release from imprisonment on charges of conspiracy with ‘persons unknown’ to cause explosions. The protagonist is a member of the IRA who is released from prison after being accused of conspiracy with ‘persons unknown’ to murder ‘persons ...

Champion of Hide and Seek

Amit Chaudhuri: Raj Kamal Jha, 16 December 2004

If You Are Afraid of Heights 
by Raj Kamal Jha.
Picador, 304 pp., £7.99, July 2004, 0 330 49327 2
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... medium. Even in colour, he’s medium brown.’ In a way, Amir is reminiscent of Auden’s ‘unknown citizen’ who ‘was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be/One against whom there was no official complaint’ and ‘worked in a factory and never got fired/ But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.’ However: ‘Was he free? Was he happy? The ...

In bed with the Surrealists

David Sylvester, 6 January 1994

Investigating Sex: Surrealist Research 1928-1932 
edited by José Pierre, translated by Malcolm Imrie.
Verso, 215 pp., £17.95, November 1992, 0 86091 378 3
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... first two reports were published at the time in La Révolution surréaliste; the other ten were unknown until a French edition edited by José Pierre appeared three years ago. This translation has an Afterword by Dawn Ades, characteristically learned, limpid and illuminating. Incidentally, Pierre’s use of the word ‘transcripts’ to describe the reports ...

Jews’ Harps

Gabriel Josipovici, 4 February 1982

Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse 
by T. Carmi.
Penguin, 608 pp., £6.95, September 1981, 0 14 042197 1
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... is good. And that makes about four hundred and fifty pages of good poetry, most of it completely unknown to English readers. What is even more startling is that this is the first comprehensive selection of Hebrew poetry not just in English but in Hebrew. To understand why this should be so is to gain an insight into the extraordinary way in which the ...

The Destruction of the Public Sphere

Ross McKibbin: Brown v. Cameron, 5 January 2006

... intends to go. Furthermore, both Cameron and Brown are in some senses, but for different reasons, unknown quantities. Cameron simply because he is unknown; Brown because he’s known only as a bruiser who tenaciously defends his own patch, not as a man who has to lead a government and a political party. Any prediction as to ...

What Columbus Didn’t Know

Peter Green: The history of cartography, 21 February 2002

The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek, the Man who Discovered Britain 
by Barry Cunliffe.
Allen Lane, 182 pp., £12.99, October 2001, 0 7139 9509 2
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Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters 
edited by J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones.
Princeton, 232 pp., £17.95, January 2002, 0 691 09259 1
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Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World: Atlas and Map-By-Map Directory 
by Richard J.A. Talbert.
Princeton, three volumes, £300, September 2000, 9780691031699
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... cave-systems. Hence weather-gods, divine anger and guidance, heaven above and hell below. The unknown is by definition strange and dangerous, and to begin with far exceeds our area of knowledge. As knowledge increases, the unknown – slowly, and most often grudgingly – diminishes. In the European model, we gradually ...

Two Poems

John Ashbery, 8 July 2010

... on Sundays, they walk a little ways into the oval spell others are soft on. She, a maid, unknown to terror, rising out of the ridge, its spreading cedars bemused and endearing. The ancestors have never been influenced by any kind of logic, not even a shrike’s, and now I can’t even say what a hornet’s-eye view of this catastrophe might ...

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