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Where the Apples Come From

T.C. Smout: What Makes an Oak Tree Grow, 29 November 2007

Woodlands 
by Oliver Rackham.
Collins, 609 pp., £25, September 2006, 0 00 720243 1
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Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees 
by Richard Mabey.
Chatto, 289 pp., £20, October 2007, 978 1 85619 733 5
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Wildwood: A Journey through Trees 
by Roger Deakin.
Hamish Hamilton, 391 pp., £20, May 2007, 978 0 241 14184 7
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The Wild Trees: What if the Last Wilderness Is above Our Heads? 
by Richard Preston.
Allen Lane, 294 pp., £20, August 2007, 978 1 84614 023 5
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... contained. It included such early classics as R.S.R. Fitter on the natural history of London, and Frank Fraser Darling on the Scottish Highlands. Rackham has all their verve and learning, the same immediacy in the telling, but an even greater wish to involve the reader in a problem and its solving. It is, he says, a book more about questions than answers. It ...

Secret Signals in Lotus Flowers

Maya Jasanoff: Myths of the Mutiny, 21 July 2005

The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination 
by Gautam Chakravarty.
Cambridge, 242 pp., £45, January 2005, 0 521 83274 8
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... The first real mutiny novel, Edward Money’s The Wife and the Ward (1859), captured this frank, demoralising view by ending with the massacre of Kanpur, and the death of all the protagonists. Unsurprisingly, later novels would conclude on a brighter, triumphant note, making Kanpur less like the charge of the Light Brigade and more like the Alamo ...

The Antagoniser’s Agoniser

Peter Clarke: Keith Joseph, 19 July 2001

Keith Joseph 
by Andrew Denham and Mark Garnett.
Acumen, 488 pp., £28, March 2001, 9781902683034
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... at his memorial service. ‘So many of us felt that was his destiny.’ He himself was engagingly frank in discounting this scenario, saying that ‘it would have been a disaster for the Party, country and for me.’ Certainly, he never looked back with any wistfulness, still less envy, on the way that this possibility was foreclosed by the spectacular rise ...

Drowned in Eau de Vie

Modris Eksteins: New, Fast and Modern, 21 February 2008

Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond 
by Peter Gay.
Heinemann, 610 pp., £20, November 2007, 978 0 434 01044 8
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... mystics. In order to cram some of them, like Knut Hamsun, into his box and then to be able to close the lid, Gay has to create the category of anti-modern Modernist. He arranges his protagonists in traditional groupings, visual artists first, followed by the literary crowd, the music consort, then architects and designers, and finally dramatists and ...

On a par with Nixon

Stephen Alford: Bad Queen Bess?, 17 November 2016

Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I 
by Peter Lake.
Oxford, 497 pp., £35, January 2016, 978 0 19 875399 5
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Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years 
by John Guy.
Viking, 494 pp., £25, May 2016, 978 0 670 92225 3
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... and deviant Elizabeth’s first court favourite, Robert Dudley) all the way, via Swift, to Frank Owen’s Guilty Men, published in 1940. Orwell wrote: ‘A pamphlet is never written primarily to give entertainment or to make money. It is written because there is something that one wants to say now, and because one believes there is no other way of ...

It was gold

Patricia Lockwood: Joan Didion’s Pointillism, 4 January 2018

Joan Didion: The Centre Will Not Hold 
directed by Griffin Dunne.
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South and West: From a Notebook 
by Joan Didion.
Fourth Estate, 160 pp., £10, September 2017, 978 0 00 825717 0
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... nephew Griffin Dunne, lacks the three-in-the-morning question. It begins with a bridge and a blur, close-ups of bare feet and fresh typewriter ink. A rat crawls over a hippie, to show that in the Swinging Sixties, anything can happen. When Didion herself appears, her mouth is bright with lipstick and amused. Her gestures are as large as fireworks. She puts her ...

World in Spectacular Light

Hal Foster: Bauhaus in Exile, 5 December 2024

Objects in Exile: Modern Art and Design across Borders 1930-60 
by Robin Schuldenfrei.
Princeton, 345 pp., £55, January 2024, 978 0 691 23266 9
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... on the analogy of the scientist as much as the humanist; for administrators the studio was as close to the laboratory as to the library carrel. This development is another significant part of the Bauhaus legacy.Another idea that bridged the gap between pragmatists and technophiles at the Bauhaus was abstraction, which was treated not only as a method but ...

In the Mad Laboratory

Gill Partington: Invisible Books, 16 February 2023

Literature’s Elsewheres: The Necessity of Radical Literary Practices 
by Annette Gilbert.
MIT, 419 pp., £30, April 2022, 978 0 262 54341 5
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Inventing the Alphabet: The Origin of Letters from Antiquity to the Present 
by Johanna Drucker.
Chicago, 380 pp., £32, July 2022, 978 0 226 81581 7
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... commissioned through freelancer.com for $75.) The resulting doggerel is sometimes surprisingly frank in its response to the task at hand:0.76. Work00:00:21 → $130.29/HR → 1/1Writing is such a hard jobMuch rather words I would robThose people on ’TurkThey’ll do all the workSo my brain I do not have to prod.Thurston’s name on the cover isn’t a ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: At NatCon London, 1 June 2023

... like he is absorbing the Viktor Orbán lesson.’ Among the speakers at NatCon London was Frank Furedi, the former leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party who currently heads the Brussels branch of a private Hungarian college that has received billions of forints from Orbán’s government. He’s called it ‘a chance to fight back in the culture ...

What does a snake know, or intend?

David Thomson: Where Joan Didion was from, 18 March 2004

Where I Was From 
by Joan Didion.
Flamingo, 240 pp., £14.99, March 2004, 0 00 717886 7
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... notices about Elena McMahon in The Last Thing He Wanted). Let me qualify ‘lovely’. It’s too close to something Didion might have picked up shopping (and she is crazy about clothes – you rarely know what her people look like, but she tells you all about the colours and the fabrics of their clothes, and the shops they came from), and it may be unduly ...

How not to do it

John Sutherland, 22 July 1993

The British Library: For Scholarship, Research and Innovation: Strategic Objectives for the Year 2000 
British Library, 39 pp., £5, June 1993, 0 7123 0321 9Show More
The Library of the British Museum: Retrospective Essays on the Department of Printed Books 
edited by P.R. Harris.
British Library, 305 pp., £35, June 1993, 0 7123 0242 5
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... cheque and the gift of some prime real estate from a government which has shown itself willing to close Barts and unwilling to invest in King’s Cross as the Chunnel terminus. Some hope. There is one other remedy, and be sure it will be taken. What are now free services (e.g. the reader’s ticket, access to stored material) will become ‘priced ...

Still it goes on

Paul Foot, 4 November 1993

Ambushed: My Story 
by Judith Ward.
Vermilion, 177 pp., £9.99, September 1993, 0 09 177820 4
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... That was not all. The confessions were backed by the most overwhelming scientific evidence. Dr Frank Skuse, a Home Office forensic scientist, had found traces of nitroglycerine on the young woman’s hands as soon as she’d been arrested. He’d also found nitroglycerine, he said, on her duffle bag, which had been rescued from one of the freight wagons ...

Rhino-Breeder

John Sturrock, 24 May 1990

Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977 
edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew Bruccoli.
Weidenfeld, 582 pp., £29.95, February 1990, 0 297 81034 0
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... should look in their bound form. But with what descriptive flair he applies his veto: ‘Dear Frank, I just got the photostat of the new jacket design for ADA, and I do not like it at all. The lettering is dumpy, with apertures en cul-de-poule. The coloration of the word ADA recalls at first blush the nacrine inner layer of a dejected shellfish, and, at a ...

Like the trees on Primrose Hill

Samuel Hynes, 2 March 1989

Louis MacNeice: A Study 
by Edna Longley.
Faber, 178 pp., £4.95, August 1988, 0 571 13748 2
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Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems 
edited by Michael Longley.
Faber, 160 pp., £4.95, August 1988, 0 571 15270 8
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A Scatter of Memories 
by Margaret Gardiner.
Free Association, 280 pp., £15.95, November 1988, 1 85343 043 9
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... as an ancestor by the present generation of Northern Irish poets. You find him in collections like Frank Ormsby’s Poets from the North of Ireland, and poets like Derek Mahon and Michael Longley praise him. The praise doesn’t come because he wrote about Northern Ireland – there are a few fine Irish poems, but not many. No, MacNeice’s importance for ...

Doom Sooner or Later

John Leslie, 5 June 1997

Imagined Worlds 
by Freeman Dyson.
Harvard, 216 pp., £14.50, May 1997, 0 674 53908 7
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... with a million million million million million times the power of a human mind’. And Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality, possibly the book nearest in flavour to Dyson’s, goes so far as to predict a system with infinite computing power. Again, why is Dyson so confident that spreading through their galaxy will make humans too far apart ...

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