Search Results

Advanced Search

46 to 60 of 13037 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Getting it right

Bernard Williams, 23 November 1989

Contingency, Irony and Solidarity 
by Richard Rorty.
Cambridge, 201 pp., £25, May 1989, 0 521 35381 5
Show More
Show More
... An energetic thinker with some original ideas may understandably rebel against the oppressive demand to get it right, especially when the demand comes, as it often does, from cautious and conventional colleagues. In responsible subjects such as the natural sciences, such people rebel against the demand only at their peril – or rather, their ideas will succeed only if the demand is, in the end, obeyed, and the colleagues turn out merely to have been too cautious ...

Falling in love with Fanny

V.S. Pritchett, 5 August 1982

Memoirs of a Midget 
by Walter de la Mare.
Oxford, 392 pp., £3.50, May 1982, 0 19 281344 7
Show More
Show More
... famous novel Memoirs of a Midget, glances at Borges and goes on to the possibility that de la Mare may be the only English Surrealist, but one with a manner that has what she calls the ‘sheen’ of the Pre-Raphaelites. This ‘sheen’ on his best prose is of course protective and is intended to give the false sense of safety in which we can play with ...

Embarrassment and Loss

Marghanita Laski, 19 February 1981

A Way to Die 
by Rosemary Zorza.
Deutsch, 254 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 0 233 97355 9
Show More
Letter to a Younger Son 
by Christopher Leach.
Dent, 155 pp., £5.95, January 1981, 0 460 04496 6
Show More
Bereavement 
by Colin Murray Parkes.
Pelican, 267 pp., £1.50, June 1980, 0 14 021833 5
Show More
Show More
... and the embarrassment the Zorzas’ book is likely to rouse in those who cannot close with it may make them feel it richer to respond to death with something more like anger than resignation. The counter-irritant that came into my mind as I read was Hal Summers’s requiem for his cat: he would not pretend That what came was a friend But met it in pure ...

Central Time

Fleur Adcock, 4 September 1986

... at 1.30 – one o’clock Central Time in Adelaide. It’s early days in Hobart Town, and Maggie May has been transported (not such fun as it sounds, poor lass) to toil upon Van Diemen’s cruel shore. It’s 1830 or thereabouts (1800 in Adelaide? No, no, this is going too far as she might have said herself at the time.) The time is three o’clock, etc. The ...

Kept Alive for Thirty Days

Stefan Collini: Metrics, 8 November 2018

The Tyranny of Metrics 
by Jerry Z. Muller.
Princeton, 220 pp., £19.95, February 2018, 978 0 691 17495 2
Show More
The Metric Tide 
by James Wilsdon et al.
Sage, 168 pp., £19.99, February 2016, 978 1 4739 7306 0
Show More
Show More
... per cent of all loving was received by just 11 per cent of the population.) At first, the metrics may be a little inexact, but they can be improved: for example, instead of simply recording the number of instances of ‘I love you,’ LovStatPlus will distinguish when it is said sincerely from when it has been prompted or said as part of an attempt to have ...

The Edges of Life

Jeremy Waldron, 12 May 1994

Life’s Dominion: An Argument about Abortion and Euthanasia 
by Ronald Dworkin.
HarperCollins, 273 pp., £17.50, May 1993, 0 394 58941 6
Show More
Show More
... in environmental disputes, quite apart from what we say on behalf of the humans involved (who may or may not have an interest in letting the trees live). Philosophers are more cautious about rights-talk. Rights, they say, are not to be invoked lightly, and are certainly not to be attributed on every occasion when some ...

Subduing the jury

E.P. Thompson, 18 December 1986

... than the present one. Jury-vetting is not the same thing as jury-packing, although the first may prepare for the second. Whether packing does or could take place in contemporary English practice is a matter remarkably obscure. The Police may properly inspect the panel against their records, in order to remove ...

Once upon a Real Time

Wendy Doniger, 23 March 1995

From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers 
by Marina Warner.
Chatto, 458 pp., £20, October 1994, 0 7011 3530 1
Show More
Show More
... story of Cinderella). I would add (following Carlo Ginzburg) that the idea of the identifying foot may also be linked with the earliest morphologies, the footprints of animals followed by prehistoric hunters – a habit enshrined in Aristotle’s, and our, classification of animals as quadrupeds, bipeds, six-legged insects etc; and that the foot is often the ...

Past, Present and Future

A.J. Ayer, 21 January 1982

Collected Philosophical Papers. Vol. I: From Parmenides to Wittgenstein 
by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Blackwell, 141 pp., £10, September 1981, 0 631 12922 7
Show More
Collected Philosophical Papers. Vol. II: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind 
by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Blackwell, 239 pp., £15, September 1981, 0 631 12932 4
Show More
Collected Philosophical Papers. Vol. III: Ethics, Religion and Politics 
by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Blackwell, 160 pp., £12, September 1981, 0 631 12942 1
Show More
Show More
... introduced it into an explanation that proposes to do without it.’ Her own solution, which she may perhaps owe to Wittgenstein, consists in subordinating what we call knowledge of the past to grammatical training in the use of the past tense. I find this unacceptable in that it runs into a dilemma: if ‘the past tense’ is construed ...

At Dulwich Picture Gallery

Peter Campbell: Gerrit Dou, 5 October 2000

... despised. His paintings were ‘monuments of an irrelevant virtue’ which showed how ‘patience may be misused’ (Walter Armstrong, Director of the National Gallery of Ireland in 1904). He was no longer avidly collected: there was not a single panel by Dou in the exhibition held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1909 of 150 Dutch paintings from the ...

On the Darwinian View of Progress

Amartya Sen, 5 November 1992

... of evolutionary progress, and it is possible that the profundity of some of the elements may make us less conscious of the dubious nature of others. In particular, Darwin’s general idea of progress – on which his notion of evolutionary progress is dependent – can have the effect of misdirecting our attention, in ways that are crucial in the ...

Fictioneering

Frank Kermode: J.M. Coetzee, 8 October 2009

Summertime 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Harvill Secker, 266 pp., £17.99, August 2009, 978 1 84655 318 9
Show More
Show More
... he wants there, having multiple skills and extraordinary, quiet energy. In Disgrace, which may be the finest of his more orthodox novels, one again senses the existence of resources of purity and power, and also reserves of feeling that may be tragic or even religious. Given his freedom to make any person in the ...

Shifting Sands

Peter Lipton: How nature works, 3 September 1998

How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organised Criticality 
by Per Bak.
Oxford, 212 pp., £18.99, June 1997, 0 19 850164 1
Show More
Show More
... such manifest design requires a Designer. The argument from design has serious weaknesses, but one may still wonder what to put in its place. Per Bak, a physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, thinks he has the answer: self-organised criticality. Bak applies this idea to a stunning range of disciplines, from geology, economics, biology and ...

Death of a Poet

Karl Miller, 22 January 1981

... texts reveal: an encounter between the orphan and the double. In this literature, the orphan may encounter his double, or may serve as someone else’s. The double may serve as a friend or as an enemy, just as the romantic ‘second self’ may be ...

Genius

Richard Gregory, 17 June 1982

The Mind’s Best Work 
by D.N. Perkins.
Harvard, 314 pp., £12.95, November 1981, 0 06 745762 2
Show More
The Mathematical Experience 
by Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh.
Harvester, 440 pp., £12.95, November 1981, 0 7108 0364 8
Show More
Show More
... Why are some people creative to the point of genius, even though they may not appear especially intelligent, or in any other way remarkable? Creativity is a long-standing puzzle which has received many trite and no very convincing accounts. Explanations range from the Divine Spark to slogging hard work; from unconscious problem-solving to super-conscious awareness; from the darkness of profound dreams to the brightness of extreme wakefulness; from slow gestations to instant insights ...

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