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Altruists at War

W.G. Runciman: Human Reciprocity, 23 February 2012

A Co-operative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution 
by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis.
Princeton, 262 pp., £24.95, July 2011, 978 0 691 15125 0
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... that led up to them. Increasingly large societies of unrelated individuals who are entirely unknown to one another are now held together not only by innate predispositions to co-operation, channelled by imitation and learning into different cultural forms, but also by social institutions that give small numbers of individuals power to control the ...

Here Be Fog

J.H. Elliott: Mapping the American West, 23 February 2012

The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-63 
by Paul Mapp.
North Carolina, 455 pp., £44.50, February 2011, 978 0 8078 3395 7
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... observes of his decision: ‘At the end of the Seven Years’ War, French diplomats treated the unknown as expendable.’ The picture that emerges from The Elusive West is one of three great powers – Britain, France and Spain – blundering their way through the American fog, tripping over obstacles they failed to see and imagining dangers that did not ...

Fashionable Gore

Katherine Rundell: H. Rider Haggard, 3 April 2014

King Solomon’s Mines 
by H. Rider Haggard.
Vintage, 337 pp., £7.99, May 2013, 978 0 09 958282 3
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She 
by H. Rider Haggard.
Vintage, 317 pp., £8.99, May 2013, 978 0 09 958283 0
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... certainly isn’t coy. It follows wise but ugly Ludwig Holly and beautiful but slow Leo Vincey to unknown lands on the east coast of Africa. Leo’s dying father bequeaths him a potsherd on which is written in Greek a family history showing that Leo is descended from the royal house of pharaohs, and an instruction that he seek out a beautiful white sorceress ...

The Obdurate Knoll

Colin Kidd: The Obdurate Knoll, 1 December 2011

Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan 
by Jeff Greenfield.
Putnam, 434 pp., £20.25, March 2011, 978 0 399 15706 6
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11.22.63 
by Stephen King.
Hodder, 740 pp., £19.99, November 2011, 978 1 4447 2729 6
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... of de Mohrenschildt’s? Just some guy on the street, or a co-conspirator? Maybe even the famous Unknown Shooter who – according to the conspiracy theorists – had been lurking on the grassy knoll near Dealey Plaza when Kennedy’s motorcade approached? I told myself that was crazy, but it was impossible to know for sure. Worse still is the sight of de ...

The Mess They’re In

Ross McKibbin: Labour’s Limited Options, 20 October 2011

... for quick fixes – rhetorical fancies that have led but to the grave. There is also a known unknown which should discourage Labour from over-committing itself: the position of the Lib Dems. Not only do we not know what the general political-economic climate will be four years from now, we do not know in particular where the Lib Dems will ...

Shaved, Rouged and Chignoned

Terry Eagleton: Fanny and Stella, 7 March 2013

Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England 
by Neil McKenna.
Faber, 396 pp., £16.99, February 2013, 978 0 571 23190 4
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... morals’ as well as conspiring ‘to solicit, induce, procure and endeavour to persuade persons unknown to commit buggery’. The court, however, was longer on words than on evidence. There were also clear indications of spying, bribery, collusion, police corruption and political interference. The treasury solicitor, it emerged, had taken personal charge of ...

Call me Ismail

Thomas Jones: Wu Ming, 18 July 2013

Altai 
by Wu Ming, translated by Shaun Whiteside.
Verso, 263 pp., £16.99, May 2013, 978 1 78168 076 6
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... for England. He retired from league football in 1994, and his name, ‘for reasons that remain unknown’, was informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and social activists all over Europe … In Italy, between 1994 and 1999, the so-called Luther Blissett Project (an organised network within the open community sharing the ‘Luther ...

The Unlucky Skeleton

Greg Afinogenov: Russian Magic Tales, 12 September 2013

Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov 
edited by Robert Chandler.
Penguin, 466 pp., £9.99, December 2012, 978 0 14 144223 5
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Red Spectres: Russian 20th-Century Gothic-Fantastic Tales 
translated by Muireann Maguire.
Angel Classics, 223 pp., £12.95, November 2012, 978 0 946162 80 2
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Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature 
by Muireann Maguire.
Peter Lang, 342 pp., £48.53, November 2012, 978 3 0343 0787 1
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... stories didn’t exist in Russia before the 16th century; mirrors, magical or otherwise, were unknown before the late 17th; balls and ballgowns are products of the 18th. The folktale doesn’t survive from primeval times but is a living, continuously adapting historical artefact. In 18th-century Russia, the struggle against the Old Believers, who ...

Gosh oh gee

Alan Allport: ‘Being Boys’, 21 November 2013

Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Interwar Years 
by Melanie Tebbutt.
Manchester, 352 pp., £75, February 2012, 978 0 7190 6613 9
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... would dress smartly and fashionably in public, opening up a possibility of embarrassment hitherto unknown to working-class men. Les Tebbutt’s diary chronicles persistent anxiety about his sartorial decisions. A tweed overcoat from the Co-op proved a good investment, but the gangsterish trilby he received with such pleasure as a Christmas present in 1936 was ...

Cosmic Inflation

David Kaiser: The Future of the Universe, 6 February 2014

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe 
by Lee Smolin.
Allen Lane, 319 pp., £20, April 2013, 978 1 84614 299 4
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... faster over time. The effects of that accelerated expansion can be measured, but the cause remains unknown. Physicists’ first thought was that dark energy arose as some quantum mechanical effect, perhaps related to the unavoidable jiggling of matter as governed by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. But when they tried to calculate the amount of dark ...

Trouble with a Dead Mule

Lawrence Rosen: Pashas, 5 August 2010

Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World 
by James Mather.
Yale, 302 pp., £25, October 2009, 978 0 300 12639 6
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... beyond the frontier, the trader brought many other things: stories of the exotic, knowledge of the unknown, foreign songs and dress, religion, disease, inventions and slaves. As a kind of confraternity that straddles the ages and the globe, such merchants can be castigated as greedy or lionised as adventurers. By virtue of their cross-pollination of cultures ...

Enemies of All Mankind

Stephen Sedley: Pirates, 24 June 2010

The Treatment of Prisoners under International Law 
by Nigel Rodley, with Matt Pollard.
Oxford, 697 pp., £85, August 2009, 978 0 19 921507 2
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The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations 
by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Zone, 295 pp., £21.95, November 2009, 978 1 890951 94 8
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The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates 
by Peter Leeson.
Princeton, 271 pp., £16.95, May 2009, 978 0 691 13747 6
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... diminish his eventual utility on the labour market. Might there just be some atavistic human urge, unknown to economists, to stay alive and if possible ...

Whose Body?

Charles Glass: ‘Operation Mincemeat’, 22 July 2010

Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War Two 
by Ben Macintyre.
Bloomsbury, 400 pp., £16.99, January 2010, 978 0 7475 9868 8
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... the wartime coup had prompted Montagu to come out first with his authorised version, published The Unknown Courier. So the tale has been told before, but Ben Macintyre has done a more thorough and readable job of it than his predecessors. His access to the classified documents and unpublished autobiography that Montagu, who died in 1985, left to his son Jeremy ...

Respectful Perversion

John Pemble: Gilbert and Sullivan, 16 June 2011

Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody 
by Carolyn Williams.
Columbia, 454 pp., £24, January 2011, 978 0 231 14804 7
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... people who mock such women, because such women are not to be mocked. ‘Of hasty tone/with dames unknown/I ought to be more chary,’ says a chastened Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe: It seems that she’s a fairy From Andersen’s librāry And I took her for The proprietor Of a ladies’ semināry! The Fairy Queen and other Gilbertian women of a certain age ...

No scene could be worse

Stephanie Burt: Adrienne Rich, 9 February 2012

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-10 
by Adrienne Rich.
Norton, 89 pp., £19.99, February 2011, 978 0 393 07967 8
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A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society 1997-2008 
by Adrienne Rich.
Norton, 180 pp., £11.99, July 2010, 978 0 393 33830 0
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... warriors; during the 1970s, female explorers, daring their way two by two through the harsh unknown. Then and now, there are also would-be male allies ultimately left behind: in Midnight Salvage (1999) a real young man in a wheelchair whom Rich dated in college; in Tonight, an imaginary friend from Rich’s childhood with the unlikely name Axel ...

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