High Priest of Mumbo-Jumbo

R.W. Johnson, 13 November 1997

Lord Hailsham: A Life 
by Geoffrey Lewis.
Cape, 403 pp., £25, October 1997, 0 224 04252 1
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... English institutions and wanted to preserve them exactly as they were. He was shocked when Sir John Donaldson, in charge of the National Industrial Relations Court, dispensed with gown and wig: wigs, gowns and flummery were the essence of the law. He not only opposed any notion that the free-market principles preached to the rest of the nation might apply ...

If Oxfam ran the world

Martha Nussbaum, 4 September 1997

Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence 
by Peter Unger.
Oxford, 187 pp., £35, October 1996, 0 19 507584 6
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... Scanlon and Thomas Pogge from the Kantian, Gerald Cohen, Brian Barry, the economists Amartya Sen, John Roemer and Partha Dasgupta, all get a nod in a footnote at most, and we hear nothing informative about how their arguments would be addressed. Major historical contributors such as Kant, Bentham and Adam Smith don’t even get a nod. So the implied reader is ...

The Crime of Monsieur Renou

Alan Ryan, 2 October 1997

The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity 
by Maurice Cranston.
Allen Lane, 247 pp., £25, March 1997, 0 7139 9166 6
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... to do it again was irresistible – and where resisted, it was resisted for a purpose, as in John Stuart Mill’s wilfully bleak and un-revealing Autobiography. It had an obvious ancestor in Augustine’s Confessions, but it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the modern personality is almost defined by Rousseau’s work, and that the difference ...
Pluralism and the Personality of the State 
by David Runciman.
Cambridge, 279 pp., £35, June 1997, 0 521 55191 9
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... could not, however, be credited to Maitland’s Cambridge colleague and fellow devotee of Gierke, John Neville Figgis. As an anti-Erastian Anglican churchman, Figgis was deeply exercised by the dispute within the Edwardian Scottish Free Church (a dispute only ultimately settled by Parliamentary legislation). And as a priest and theologian in the ...

Colloquially Speaking

Patrick McGuinness: Poetry from Britain and Ireland after 1945, 1 April 1999

The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 
edited by Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford.
Viking, 480 pp., £10.99, September 1998, 0 670 86829 9
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The Firebox: Poetry from Britain and Ireland after 1945 
edited by Sean O’Brien.
Picador, 534 pp., £16.99, October 1998, 0 330 36918 0
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... for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by Polygon in ...

Scientific Antlers

Steven Shapin: Fraud in the Lab, 4 March 1999

The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science and Character 
by Daniel Kevles.
Norton, 509 pp., £21, October 1998, 0 393 04103 4
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... scientific fraud-busters Walter Stewart and Ned Feder and their patron, the Democratic Congressman John Dingell. For the excellent Linda Tripp with her concealed tape-recorder read Imanishi-Kari’s young Irish-American co-worker at MIT, Margot O’Toole, and the 17 pages of laboratory entries she decided to copy from a colleague’s notebook – just in case ...

Entranced by the Factory

Simon Schaffer: Maxwell’s Demon, 29 April 1999

The Natural Philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell 
by P.M. Harman.
Cambridge, 232 pp., £35, April 1998, 0 521 56102 7
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... into the stormy world of Victorian journalism, where public scientists such as T.H. Huxley and John Tyndall preached materialism, evolutionism and other views Maxwell (among many others) found loathsome. In 1868, the Saturday Review, edited by the erudite and chilly Oxford don Mark Pattison, biographer of the original Casaubon, summarised recent dangerous ...

Brutish Babies

David Wootton: Witchcraft, 11 November 1999

Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night 
by Wolfgang Behringer, translated by H.C.Erik Midelfort.
Virginia, 203 pp., £14.50, September 1998, 0 8139 1853 7
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Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe 
by Stuart Clark.
Oxford, 845 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 19 820001 3
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Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England 
by Alan Macfarlane.
Routledge, 368 pp., £55, April 1999, 0 415 19611 6
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The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A Horrible and True Story of Football, Witchcraft, Murder and the King of England 
by James Sharpe.
Profile, 256 pp., £16.99, November 1999, 9781861970480
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... available from the beginning, and two new ones have been developed in recent years. First, since John Demos’s work on Salem (1982), some historians have been keen to provide psychological explanations of the fear that gripped whole societies, but in particular those who believed themselves bewitched. Much of the most interesting work done on these lines ...

Diary

Rosemary Dinnage: Evacuees, 14 October 1999

... Mr Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh.) And the realisation of what separation means, put forward by John Bowlby and others, ended the disastrous practice of keeping parents away from child patients in hospitals. In North London, more was being learned about children separated from their families. At Anna Freud’s Hampstead Nurseries, first set up as a refuge ...

There is no alternative to becoming Leadbeater

Nick Cohen: Charles Leadbeater, 28 October 1999

Living on Thin Air: The New Economy 
by Charles Leadbeater.
Viking, 244 pp., £17.99, July 1999, 0 670 87669 0
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... values. It is at this moment that the cute fables, the family vignettes and the ghastly Janet-and-John style hit the real world with a thud. Britain under Thatcher gave the world privatisation. Blair is attracting equal international interest by taking the dissolution of communal wealth on to the next stage. New Labour is handing assets to corporate Britain ...

Just Had To

R.W. Johnson: LBJ, 20 March 2003

The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Vol III: Master of the Senate 
by Robert A. Caro.
Cape, 1102 pp., £30, August 2002, 0 394 52836 0
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... of the AFL-CIO, LBJ managed to get the railway brotherhoods and even the mineworkers’ leader, John L. Lewis, to support the extension of jury trial, for they had suffered from the lack of it under the Taft-Hartley Act and then, by delaying all other legislation, even got the postal unions to lobby for the Bill in their desperation to get it out of the way ...

What Sport!

Paul Laity: George Steer, 5 June 2003

Telegram from Guernica: The Extraordinary Life of George Steer, War Correspondent 
by Nicholas Rankin.
Faber, 256 pp., £14.99, April 2003, 0 571 20563 1
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... he was also strongly partisan; on occasions, he came close to ‘going native’, in the manner of John Reed with the Red Guards in Petrograd. His journalism always threatened to tip over into a more direct, military involvement – until he finally became, and died, a soldier. A South African born into a liberal, newspaper-owning family in the Eastern ...

Kettles boil, classes struggle

Terry Eagleton: Lukács recants, 20 February 2003

A Defence of ‘History and Class Consciousness’: Tailism and the Dialectic 
by Georg Lukács, translated by Esther Leslie.
Verso, 182 pp., £10, June 2002, 1 85984 370 0
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... our knowledge of Nature is always socially mediated. This is one of several issues which divide John Rees, who has written an erudite, illuminating introduction to this book, and Slavoj Žižek, who has provided a characteristically provocative ‘postface’ for it. Roughly speaking, Rees seeks rather stiffly to reclaim Lukács for a certain Marxist ...

Journey to Arezzo

Nicholas Penny: The Apotheosis of Piero, 17 April 2003

Piero della Francesca 
by Roberto Longhi, translated by David Tabbat.
Sheep Meadow, 364 pp., £32.50, September 2002, 1 878818 77 5
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... Museum) and the National Gallery. Piero della Francesca was a figure of special interest for both John Charles Robinson, an agent for South Kensington as well as for private collectors, and Charles Eastlake, the first director of the National Gallery, because of the extreme rarity of his portable pictures. There was only one work by him in any public – or ...

Saddamism after Saddam

Charles Glass: After the Invasion, 8 May 2003

... will be no one but soldiers and bandits. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ John Bagot Glubb, a young lieutenant bearing wounds from the war in France, arrived in Mesopotamia in 1920. His assignment was to command armed patrols through the desert of what would become, under its first Western occupier, Iraq. The British bureaucracy, he ...