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At the Royal Scottish Academy

Nicholas Penny: The Age of Titian, 21 October 2004

... which not only evoke the type of frame that might originally have surrounded the painting, but may even be considered as an abstract or epitome of Bassano’s tightly interlaced composition, with the browns, yellows and whites of the painting matched by the partly gilded and silvered walnut.In another room, however, daylight has been cut out to protect ...

Kipling’s Lightning-Flash

Barbara Everett, 10 January 1991

... turns to women and to love – to those desertions or ‘absences without leave’ which passion may bring about, and to desertion simply. The men exchange memories of troubles more or less humorous, among them a massive court-martialling once provoked by a trick played by one Boy Niven, who led a large group of seamen and marines on a wild-goose-chase in ...

What Europeans Talk about when They Talk about Brexit

LRB Contributors: On Brexit, 3 January 2019

... watch the Götterdämmerung of ineptocracy that is Brexit, they are baffled but entertained. There may be some well-deserved Schadenfreude as they watch what happens to a country that becomes addicted to fetishising its own nationhood and imbibes too many of the clichés it once produced for export: commonsensical, mild, tolerant people led by ...

What difference did she make?

Eric Hobsbawm, 23 May 1991

A Question of Leadership: Gladstone to Thatcher 
by Peter Clarke.
Hamish Hamilton, 334 pp., £17.99, April 1991, 0 241 13005 0
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The Quiet Rise of John Major 
by Edward Pearce.
Weidenfeld, 177 pp., £14.99, April 1991, 0 297 81208 4
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... believers in the cult of personality, who range from newspaper editors to political historians, it may make very little difference. As John Kenneth Galbraith has observed, changing the top man in important business corporations rarely affects the price of their shares on the market. A rapid glance at the history of the USA also suggests scepticism about the ...

The Pink Hotel

Wayne Koestenbaum, 3 April 1997

The Last Thing He Wanted 
by Joan Didion.
Flamingo, 227 pp., £15.99, January 1997, 0 00 224080 7
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... watches the television screen. I watch the curtains, and imagine the swell of the water. A hotel may be luxurious; it may also be impoverished. Didion’s characters stay in luxury hotels but also middle-of-the-road establishments. No safe haven, a hotel is a cesspool that sucks the guest down into anonymity. In a ...

World’s End

John Ryle, 13 October 1988

The Missionaries 
by Norman Lewis.
Secker, 245 pp., £10.95, May 1988, 0 436 24595 7
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... in its domestic form, thanks to the recent fiscal and sexual peccadilloes of TV preachers, it may come as a surprise to learn that these organisations, NTM and SIL, dedicated to the completion of the Great Commission, represent the biggest missionary enterprise in Christian history. Such people have no time for the swaggerers and braggarts of the ...

Ravishing Atrocities

Patrick Maynard, 7 January 1988

Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane 
by Michael Fried.
Chicago, 215 pp., £23.95, April 1987, 0 226 26210 3
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Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology 
by W.J.T. Mitchell.
Chicago, 226 pp., £7.25, October 1987, 0 226 53229 1
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... them by making us imagine that we see them. Where reality is shocking, realism of representation may entail shock. Realistic devices such as perspective, highlight, colour and motion are sometimes seen simply as devices for letting reality come through into the picture. But we know by now that the situation is not so simple. That a camera is present, that it ...

Thinking about bonsai trees

Judith Shklar, 18 April 1985

Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets 
by Yi-Fu Tuan.
Yale, 193 pp., £15.95, October 1984, 0 300 03222 6
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... it, is, in Tuan’s view, not only inherent in affection, it can be exercised upon anything that may be said to live. It is at this point that the peculiarity of the book begins to emerge, for Tuan ascribes life not only to animals and plants but also to water. Moreover he makes no distinctions between sentient and other natural beings. Anything in the ...

A New Verismo

John Bayley, 8 January 1987

The Master Eccentric: The Journals of Rayner Heppenstall 1969-1981 
edited by Jonathan Goodman.
Allison and Busby, 278 pp., £14.95, December 1986, 0 85031 536 0
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The Pier 
by Rayner Heppenstall.
Allison and Busby, 192 pp., £9.95, December 1986, 9780850314502
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... never in the smallest degree be like life but only like other examples of literature. The paradox may briefly amuse them. They may conclude that whereas writers – novelists particularly – were instinctively conditioned to make reading seem like living, critics were programmed in the opposite direction – to point out ...

Fits and Excursions

Walter Nash, 7 August 1986

The Complete Plain Words 
by Ernest Gowers, edited by Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut.
HMSO, 288 pp., £5.50, May 1986, 0 11 701121 5
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Educational Linguistics 
by Michael Stubbs.
Blackwell, 286 pp., £25, June 1986, 0 631 13898 6
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... be tedious to do so, and of little interest to most users of the book.’ Most users of the book may well agree: but it is nonetheless interesting to trace the history of a standard work, to see how authority takes or shifts its stance. Editorial revisions and additions, perhaps not in themselves extensive, may appreciably ...

In place of fairies

Simon Schaffer, 2 December 1982

Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic 
by Daniel O’Keefe.
Martin Robertson, 581 pp., £17.50, September 1982, 0 85520 486 9
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Scienze, Credenze Occulti, Livelli di Cultura 
edited by Paola Zambelli.
Leo Olschki, 562 pp., April 1982, 88 222 3069 8
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... ritual, and specifically of magic and its relation with religion. Indeed, these social sciences may be said to have emerged from that study. The classics of modern social science, whether Durkheim, Mauss, Evans-Pritchard or Weber, have all been obsessed by these issues, which they connect more or less closely with the very origins of our own society. Here ...

My space or yours?

Peter Campbell, 17 October 1996

Life on the Screen 
by Sherry Turkle.
Weidenfeld, 250 pp., £18.99, April 1996, 0 297 81514 8
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... In the world which is entered by way of the computer people are often not what they seem; they may hide behind their screens and offer false descriptions of themselves. The boundaries between truth and fiction are hard to police in cyberspace – it could have been expressly made for tricksters, liars and fantasists ...

High Punctuation

Christopher Ricks, 14 May 1992

But I digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse 
by John Lennard.
Oxford, 324 pp., £35, November 1991, 0 19 811247 5
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... says that lunulae are appropriate for any ‘unnecessary parcell of speach which nevertheless may be thence without any detriment to the rest’; and the notion is still current. But Leander for one would take exception to missing out ‘(come thither)’.Delectable – though I may as well take my small revenge ...

Regicide Rocks

Clare Jackson, 17 November 2022

Act of Oblivion 
by Robert Harris.
Hutchinson Heinemann, 480 pp., £22, September, 978 1 5291 5175 6
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... his son-in-law, was the fourteenth signatory; Ludlow was the fortieth.After the Restoration in May 1660, the signatories found themselves hunted regicides. Ludlow left London for Dieppe in August and spent more than three decades in exile, in Geneva, Lausanne, Vevey and Bern. Revolutionary change in 1689 prompted him to risk returning to England, but this ...

Why would Mother Nature bother?

Jerry Fodor, 6 March 2003

Freedom Evolves 
by Daniel Dennett.
Allen Lane, 347 pp., £20, February 2003, 0 7139 9339 1
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... parenthetical) passage, Dennett sort of ‘fesses up to this: ‘hard determinists . . . may find in subsequent chapters that [their] considered view is that whereas free will – as [they] understand the term – truly doesn’t exist, something rather like free will does exist, and it’s just what the doctor ordered for shoring up your moral ...

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