Lectures about Heaven

Thomas Laqueur: Forgiving Germany, 7 June 2007

Five Germanys I Have Known 
by Fritz Stern.
Farrar, Straus, 560 pp., £11.25, July 2007, 978 0 374 53086 0
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... only after a tirade of anti-semitic remarks and character assassination. ‘However foolish one may wish to call this … to maintain my own integrity I thought it indispensable to claim to the last all the rights available to me under the law,’ he wrote in his memoirs. Arrested again in 1935 and sent to Dachau, he emerged in 1937 with plans to sue the ...

An Emotional Subject

J.Z. Young, 21 April 1983

The Myths of Human Evolution 
by Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall.
Columbia, 197 pp., $22.50, November 1981, 0 231 05144 1
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... Another ‘myth’ is that evolution has been ‘progressive’. This idea may have been inherited, as the authors suggest, from the Victorian concept of social evolution: but surely it is now possible to agree that in the 3000 million years of evolution from the earliest known bacteria to mammals and flowering plants there has been a ...

Is that you, James?

Thomas Nagel, 1 October 1987

Philosophy and the Brain 
by J.Z. Young.
Oxford, 241 pp., £12.95, January 1987, 0 19 219215 9
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Freedom and Belief 
by Galen Strawson.
Oxford, 353 pp., £27.50, January 1987, 0 19 824938 1
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The Oxford Companion to the Mind 
edited by Richard Gregory.
Oxford, 874 pp., £25, September 1987, 9780198661245
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... produce appropriate outputs towards motor centres. The first response to the sound ‘Hullo’ may be a sharpening of attention and then, if it is repeated, perhaps a pattern of motor activity by the larynx and muscles of the throat that sends the response ‘Yes – is that you, James?’ There are evidently some gaps in the physiological story, but they ...

Richly-Wristed

Ian Aitken, 13 May 1993

Changing Faces: The History of the ‘Guardian’, 1956-88 
by Geoffrey Taylor.
Fourth Estate, 352 pp., £20, March 1993, 1 85702 100 2
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... the Astor Times and later with the Thomson Times. It was long after the event that I learned how Richard Scott, Laurance’s cousin and the chairman of the Scott Trust, flew to London from Washington on what my old employers would have called a ‘mercy mission’ to save us from being sold into slavery by his kinsman. This ignorance ...

Diary

Peter Wollen: In the Tunnel, 28 April 1994

... unnaturally large, with their heads reaching nearly up to the ceiling, as the British sculptor Richard Deacon showed us in photographs of visitors to the labyrinth of tiny tunnels which run under the city of Chicago. The tunnel becomes claustrophobic, oppressive, odd. On the other hand, if the tunnel is very large, it becomes ...

Darkness Visible

George Steiner, 24 November 1988

Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant 
by Richard Lebrun.
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 366 pp., £30.35, October 1988, 0 7735 0645 4
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... meditative, fundamental critique of French Revolutionary ideals and practices. Professor Richard Lebrun’s monograph on Joseph de Maistre is, at many points, a pioneering effort. Burke’s indictment, with its complexly diverse legacy in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, in Carlyle, in Yeats, and in Orwell’s riposte (both to Dickens and Burke), is ...

Diary

Peter Craven: On the Demidenko Affair, 16 November 1995

... we had determined weeks before the Demidenko affair reached its final phase to give the prize to Richard Flanagan, for his magical-realist investigation of Tasmania’s history, The Death of a River Guide. Helen Demidenko published her novel, The Hand That Signed the Paper, in 1994, when she was 23. She claimed that, like the narrator of her book, she had a ...

Urban Humanist

Sydney Checkland, 15 September 1983

Exploring the Urban Past: Essays in Urban History by H.J. Dyos 
edited by David Cannadine and David Reeder.
Cambridge, 258 pp., £20, September 1982, 0 521 24624 5
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Themes in Urban History: Patricians, Power and Politics in 19th-Century Towns 
edited by David Cannadine.
Leicester University Press, 224 pp., £16.50, October 1982, 9780718511937
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... abdication’. His gratification that this framework accommodates the findings of his contributors may be somewhat overdone. His second synthesis is a broader one which includes the lesser. It has to do with the role of the landed men in English life in a much more general sense, and represents a current reinter-pretational convergence. It is that the landed ...

America first

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 7 January 1993

European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism 
by Anthony Pagden.
Yale, 212 pp., £18.95, January 1993, 0 300 05285 5
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New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery 
by Anthony Grafton, April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi.
Harvard, 282 pp., £23.95, October 1992, 0 674 61875 0
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The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus 
by Valerie Flint.
Princeton, 233 pp., £16, August 1992, 0 691 05681 1
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Land without Evil: Utopian Journeys across the South American Watershed 
by Richard Gott.
Verso, 299 pp., £18.95, January 1993, 0 86091 398 8
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... a Columbus who was both prophet and profiteer. The lesson is salutary: Columbus’s religion may have started as an affectation before it became an intense conviction. He was, after all, a professional salesman and natural rhetorician, who had an infallible trick of telling potential backers what they wanted to hear. He had thoroughly rumbled the ...

Divinely Ordained

Eric Foner: Lincoln, 23 October 2003

Lincoln 
by Richard Carwardine.
Longman, 352 pp., £16.99, May 2003, 0 582 03279 2
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Lincoln's Constitution 
by Daniel Farber.
Chicago, 240 pp., £20.50, May 2003, 0 226 23793 1
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... to lead public opinion – rather like Bill Clinton. Although conceived before 11 September, both Richard Carwardine and Daniel Farber’s books have at least one eye on the present. Carwardine focuses on Lincoln’s relationship to different kinds of power – political, military and moral, and the power of public opinion and religious enthusiasm in an ...

Dangerously Insane

Deyan Sudjic: Léon Krier, 7 October 2010

The Architecture of Community 
by Léon Krier.
Island, 459 pp., £12.99, February 2010, 978 1 59726 579 9
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... better than it looks, and on the other, that Nazi architecture is profoundly bad, however good it may look. When he was young, Krier argued that it was the melancholy duty of every architect of principle to give up any idea of building at all. ‘A responsible architect cannot possibly build today … Building can only mean a greater or smaller degree of ...

Seven Miles per Hour

Robert Macfarlane: The men who invented flight, 5 February 2004

First to Fly: The Unlikely Triumph of Wilbur and Orville Wright 
by James Tobin.
Murray, 431 pp., £9.99, November 2003, 0 7195 5738 0
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The Wright Brothers: The Aviation Pioneers who Changed the World 
by Ian Mackersey.
Little, Brown, 554 pp., £20, October 2003, 0 316 86144 8
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Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight 
by Paul Hoffman.
Fourth Estate, 369 pp., £18.99, June 2003, 1 84115 368 0
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Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity to the First World War 
by Richard Hallion.
Oxford, 531 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 19 516035 5
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... He was a finely ironic self-dramatist, too, scheduling the first trial of Airship No. 2 for 11 May 1899 – the Feast of the Ascension. Paris, unsurprisingly, adored him. In 1901, at the height of his fame, a newspaper described him as the city’s ‘god’, and noted the homophony between his name and those of Porthos and Athos. Milliners created a ...

Keeping Score

Ian Jackman: Joe DiMaggio, 10 May 2001

Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life 
by Richard Ben Cramer.
Simon and Schuster, 560 pp., £20, April 2001, 0 684 85391 4
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... In the closing stages of Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of Joe DiMaggio there is an exchange between the baseball legend and a man called Cappy Harada for whom DiMaggio had done a bit of business. The episode is undated in the book, but took place some time before the San Francisco earthquake of 1989, at which time DiMaggio was 74 ...

Thinking

Peter Campbell, 4 August 1988

Who got Einstein’s office? Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study 
by Ed Regis.
Simon and Schuster, 316 pp., £12.95, April 1988, 0 671 69923 7
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Chaos 
by James Gleick.
Heinemann, 354 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 9780434295548
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The School of Genius 
by Anthony Storr.
Deutsch, 216 pp., £12.95, June 1988, 0 233 98010 5
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... I was in Los Angeles this spring on the day Richard Feynman died. The next morning I saw a banner lowered from the top of the tower block which stands in the middle of the Caltech campus. It read: ‘WE LOVE YOU DICK.’ The obituary of Feynman in the LA Times was awed and affectionate. It listed his achievements – his work in physics, the Nobel Prize it earned him and his work on the nuclear bomb ...

‘Someone you had to be a bit careful with’

David Sylvester: Gallery Rogues, 30 March 2000

Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser 
by Harriet Vyner.
Faber, 317 pp., £20, October 1999, 0 571 19627 6
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... the law. And, having lived lives generally presumed to have been even shadier than they were, they may well be immortalised as builders of temples of high culture. An authorised biography has now appeared of an English dealer of recent memory, Robert Fraser, 1937-86. His chequered career, terminated by Aids, lasted as long as it did only because of subsidies ...