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Lorraine Daston: Charles Darwin, 8 May 2003

Charles Darwin. Vol. II: The Power of Place 
by Janet Browne.
Cape, 591 pp., £25, November 2002, 0 224 04212 2
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... his career as a naturalist: his father, and his scientific mentor, the Cambridge professor John Henslow. While Desmond and Moore’s style was colourful, punchy and occasionally melodramatic, liberally embellished with exclamation marks, the tone of Browne’s writing, though no less vivid, is often lightly ironic. She has Darwin showing off to Henslow ...

Oak in a Flowerpot

Anthony Pagden: When Britons were slaves, 14 November 2002

Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 
by Linda Colley.
Cape, 438 pp., £20, September 2002, 0 224 05925 4
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... it. Even the man who was to become the most famous of the early English captives in America, John Smith, who had been ‘rescued’ from the Algonquin chief, Powhatan, by his daughter Pocahontas (playing Medea to Smith’s Jason), had first been captured by the Turks and sold as a slave in Istanbul. The continuity of the stories of the Empire from the ...

I am the thing itself

Rosemary Hill: Hooray for Harriette, 25 September 2003

Harriette Wilson’s ‘Memoirs’ 
edited by Lesley Blanch.
Phoenix, 472 pp., £9.99, December 2002, 1 84212 632 6
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The Courtesan’s Revenge: Harriette Wilson, the Woman who Blackmailed the King 
by Frances Wilson.
Faber, 338 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 571 20504 6
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... as well as her ingenuousness are revealed by the fact that she went first to Byron’s publisher, John Murray, who treated her with ‘much rudeness’. It was Joseph Stockdale, the Methodist pornographer of Covent Garden, who finally took the book on. Frances Wilson’s account of the scandal that followed publication is ...

Diary

Peter Pomerantsev: What fascists?, 19 June 2014

... it has only songs, legends, it is somehow outside of time’; or it can be more insulting, as in Joseph Brodsky’s (unpublished but publicly performed) poem about foolish ‘hohli’ – the pejorative term for Ukrainians – and their ‘gibberish’ national poetry. But the language and imagery were more sombre in internet gifs and jokes. Ukrainians were ...

Everybody behaved perfectly

Eric Hobsbawm: Hilde’s Two Husbands, 25 August 2011

Scientist Spies: A Memoir of My Three Parents and the Atom Bomb 
by Paul Broda.
Troubador, 333 pp., £17.50, April 2011, 978 1 84876 607 5
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... Britain in the era of anti-Fascism. Broda’s protagonists do not belong in the shadowy world of John le Carré’s intelligence professionals or agents, or even the milieu of full-time Communist Party or Comintern functionaries, let alone the Party cadres trained into total identification with Moscow in institutions like the Lenin School. Their life was ...

Do hens have hands?

Adam Smyth: Editorial Interference, 5 July 2012

The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe (Panizzi Lectures) 
by Anthony Grafton.
British Library, 144 pp., £30, September 2011, 978 0 7123 5845 3
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... source of woe. In exile from Marian England and toiling reluctantly as a corrector in Basel, John Foxe said he had never read anything ‘less pleasant, more choppy or more rebarbative’ than Stephen Gardiner’s prose (‘he spirals off so wildly that he needs a Sibyl rather than a translator’); Balthasar Moretus of the Plantin company complained ...

Tocqueville anticipated me

Katrina Forrester: Karl Popper, 26 April 2012

After ‘The Open Society’: Selected Social and Political Writings 
by Karl Popper, edited by Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner.
Routledge, 493 pp., £16.99, August 2011, 978 0 415 61023 0
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... a little different if they had. In a number of the essays collected here Popper sounds a lot like John Rawls, who emphasised the importance of distributive justice and the need for social policies that improve the lot of the least well-off: a far cry from Friedman’s market liberalism, and from the neoliberalism of today. This was a road not ...

Lord Cardigan’s Cherry Pants

Ferdinand Mount: The benefits of the Crimean War, 20 May 2004

The Crimean War: The Truth behind the Myth 
by Clive Ponting.
Chatto, 379 pp., £20, March 2004, 0 7011 7390 4
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... after the ‘black bottle’ incident when he accused a respected ‘Indian’ officer, Captain John Reynolds, of ordering a bottle of porter at the mess table of the 11th, where only champagne was allowed. Reynolds protested that he had in fact ordered Moselle, which came in a similar black bottle. Cardigan refused to accept this as an excuse, since ...

Rivonia Days

R.W. Johnson: Remembering the trial, 16 August 2007

The State v. Nelson Mandela: The Trial That Changed South Africa 
by Joel Joffe.
Oneworld, 288 pp., £16.99, July 2007, 978 1 85168 500 4
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... intellectual (with a high-pitched voice) who became the stormtroopers’ greatest propagandist, Joseph Goebbels. Yet the trial was not completely unfair. Justice Quartus De Wet, who heard the case, had all the normal white South African prejudices, but Joffe believes he was his own man and not a politicians’ puppet. Certainly, De Wet saw right through ...

Living It

Andrew O’Hagan: The World of Andy McNab, 24 January 2008

Crossfire 
by Andy McNab.
Bantam, 414 pp., £17.99, October 2007, 978 1 84413 535 6
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Strike Back 
by Chris Ryan.
Century, 314 pp., £17.99, October 2007, 978 1 84413 535 6
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... Second World War, every male contender – William Styron, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, James Jones, Joseph Heller – had done some service and wanted to write literary masterpieces filled with the perfumes of combat.* It is only in more recent times that the task of writing novels about battle has fallen chiefly to bad writers. It might describe changes in our ...

How to Get Another Thorax

Steven Rose: Epigenetics, 8 September 2016

... Library). In the 1930s, a group of young biologists in Cambridge associated with the embryologist Joseph Needham formed the Theoretical Biology Club (TBC), calling themselves ‘organicists’ in an attempt to transcend the tired opposition between mechanism and vitalism. At the International Congress on the History of Science and Technology in London in ...

Blame it on his social life

Nicholas Penny: Kenneth Clark, 5 January 2017

Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and ‘Civilisation’ 
by James Stourton.
William Collins, 478 pp., £30, September 2016, 978 0 00 749341 8
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... voyage to Australia, beckoned by the National Gallery of Victoria, which he had advised, and by Joseph Burke of Melbourne University, who believed that Clark would stimulate cultural interests in his compatriots. Clark wrote a contrite and affectionate note to his first wife, Jane, assuring her that there would be no more ‘silly fits’. This curious ...

Diary

David Margolick: Fred Sparks’s Bequest, 21 November 2024

... to Ken Auletta, then of the Daily News, they were ‘a cross between a Marx Brothers movie and a Joseph McCarthy inquiry’.The case brought Sparks in death a level of attention from the prestige press he had never enjoyed while alive. Reporting for the Washington Post, Joyce Wadler got conflicting appraisals of the man. ‘The PLO, as he saw it and told me ...

Britain’s Thermonuclear Bluff

Norman Dombey and Eric Grove, 22 October 1992

... Cook, scientific director of the Grapple test series; some recent disclosures on the part of John Ward, who was employed at the British nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington. It may well be that there ...

A Man of No Mind

Colm Tóibín: The Passion of Roger Casement, 13 September 2012

The Dream of the Celt 
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith Grossman.
Faber, 404 pp., £18.99, June 2012, 978 0 571 27571 7
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... three of these who stand out most are Henry Morton Stanley, who explored the route, the novelist Joseph Conrad, and the Irish patriot and human rights activist Roger Casement. It was Casement and a Frenchman living in England, E.D. Morel, who first drew attention to the crimes committed in the Congo in the name of progress and trade. Mario Vargas Llosa wrote ...

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