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Dr Küng’s Fiasco

Alasdair MacIntyre, 5 February 1981

Does God exist? 
by Hans Küng, translated by Edward Quinn.
Collins, 839 pp., £12, November 1980, 0 00 215147 2
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... the alternative of making a non-rational choice? Dr Küng’s answer to this question rests on a prior thesis about what he takes to be an even more fundamental universal human choice, the choice between nihilism and what he calls ‘fundamental trust’. He approaches his characterisation of this latter choice by drawing upon the views of certain modern ...

Ti tum ti tum ti tum

Colin Burrow: Chic Sport Shirker, 7 October 2021

Along Heroic Lines 
by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 330 pp., £20, April, 978 0 19 289465 6
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... two decades on topics such as Dryden’s triplets, Shakespeare and anagrams, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Byron, Norman Mailer, Ion Bugan, Samuel Beckett, Geoffrey Hill, and what Ricks argues is the non-distinction between poetry and prose. ‘Any claim to coherence has to be a mild one,’ Ricks says of the volume, since the two subjects, heroism and the ...

The Sense of the Self

Galen Strawson, 18 April 1996

... of effort and attention, and the place from which ... emanate the fiats of the will’, in William James’s words. This seems very plausible. Suppose the seven elements capture the conceptual core of the ordinary human sense of the self. The question then arises whether they are all essential to anything counting as a genuine sense of the self. I will ...

Putin’s Counter-Revolution

James Meek, 20 March 2014

... of like-minded right-wingers had taken for their exclusive use. Yarosh had been chosen as leader; prior to that he’d headed an organisation called Stepan Bandera Trident, the trident being Ukraine’s national symbol. ‘People say we’re terrorists, extremists,’ he said. ‘In fact we are nationalist revolutionaries. There’s nothing extremist in ...

Golden Horn

Malise Ruthven, 1 March 1984

Pierre Loti: Portrait of an Escapist 
by Lesley Blanch.
Collins, 330 pp., £12.50, October 1983, 0 00 211649 9
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... it. But practically (and this is his first-rate triumph) we don’t think much about it. Henry James is not the first writer to have been impressed yet baffled by Pierre Loti. Anatole France, who called him the ‘sublime illiterate’, believed that, of all their contemporaries, he was ‘the most sure to last’. To his peers Loti was a distinct ...
... was eagerly sought by colleagues running for re-election to the House and Senate. In the weeks prior to the polls, he travelled back and forth across his uniquely large constituency in support of Republican candidates. In the event, most of the Republican Senators in danger of losing their seats duly lost them. Reagan’s energetic campaigning on behalf of ...

On the Sands

Anne Enright: At Sandymount Strand, 26 May 2022

... Gerty, was at the end of Leahy Road in Sandymount. It is where, reputedly, on 16 June 1904, James Joyce took Nora Barnacle on their first date, when she slid her hand down inside his trousers to move his shirt ‘softly aside’. With hindsight, Joyce saw something in that moment (eyes closed, eyes open): a kind of crux in his life, the fact that his ...

I have written as I rode

Adam Smyth: ‘Brief Lives’, 8 October 2015

‘Brief Lives’ with ‘An Apparatus for the Lives of Our English Mathematical Writers’ 
by John Aubrey, edited by Kate Bennett.
Oxford, 1968 pp., £250, March 2015, 978 0 19 968953 8
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John Aubrey: My Own Life 
by Ruth Scurr.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, March 2015, 978 0 7011 7907 6
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... the time (or knowledge) to fill; slips of paper with notes like ‘pray remember to looke upon Mr James Harrington’s life: upon my alterations there’; marginal references to ‘quaere iterum’ (‘inquire again’); and references to a crowd of other texts with which Aubrey’s writings are always chattering. Often, in fact, what he is doing is not ...

Learned Insane

Simon Schaffer: The Lunar Men, 17 April 2003

The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future 
by Jenny Uglow.
Faber, 588 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 571 19647 0
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... together in England’. Yet during the lifetime of its members, who also included the engineer James Watt, the manufacturer Matthew Boulton and the chemist and radical Joseph Priestley, the Society was barely visible in print. No learned memoirs appeared under its auspices, no grand assemblies were organised by its fellowship. According to the son of the ...

A Science of Tuesdays

Jerry Fodor, 20 July 2000

The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World 
by Hilary Putnam.
Columbia, 221 pp., £17.50, January 2000, 0 231 10286 0
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... realism about perception that he shares with such of his ‘philosophical heroes’ as Dewey, James (W.; certainly not H.), Peirce, J.L. Austin, John McDowell, Husserl (with reservations) and, of course, Wittgenstein. Disappointingly, however, neither Putnam nor anybody else in his direct realist pantheon is prepared actually to offer an account of how ...

Making a Costume Drama out of a Crisis

Jenny Diski: ‘Downton Abbey’, 21 June 2012

Downton Abbey: Series One and Two 
Universal DVD, £39.99, November 2011Show More
Upstairs Downstairs: Complete Series One and Two 
BBC DVD, £17.99, April 2012Show More
Park Lane 
by Frances Osborne.
Virago, 336 pp., £14.99, June 2012, 978 1 84408 479 1
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Habits of the House 
by Fay Weldon.
Head of Zeus, 320 pp., £14.99, July 2012, 978 1 908800 04 6
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... of them. I even have to will myself to watch modern film or TV adaptations of Dickens, Trollope or James, and when it comes to Jane Austen adaptations, I refuse. This is not because I’m an anti-television snob. I watch TV and box sets of popular drama series in greedy excess. Westerns, thrillers, political, medical, legal and science fiction are welcome even ...

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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... back in Tonight, a book as explicit as late Yeats or late Heaney in its return to the poet’s prior work. There are also recurring character types: during the late 1960s, guerrilla 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 ...

Mindblind

Ian Hacking: Religion’s evolutionary origins, 21 October 2004

In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion 
by Scott Atran.
Oxford, 348 pp., £20.99, November 2002, 0 19 514930 0
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... religion is all about, all the diverse ways in which it continues to move millions. When William James gave his lectures on the varieties of religious experience, he wasn’t speaking of boxes full of anthropological data, but of lived experience. Of course it is important to test the hypothesis that prayer reduces stress, or that old people are ‘more ...

Haleking

John Bossy: Simon Forman, 22 February 2001

The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman 
by Barbara Howard Traister.
Chicago, 260 pp., £19, February 2001, 0 226 81140 9
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Dr Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician 
by Judith Cook.
Chatto, 228 pp., £18.99, January 2001, 0 7011 6899 4
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... lady. She did not, though Forman said she would, but thanks to Rowse and to his informant Roger Prior, she has become sufficiently famous after her death to make up for her failure to become a lady in life. Rowse found another Shakespearian connection who had consulted Forman: the wife of a French wig-maker in Silver Street in London, Mrs ...

Short Cuts

Stephen Sedley: The Supreme Court’s Judgment, 2 March 2017

... counsel to the government when at the bar) – had held on cogently reasoned grounds that the prior authority of an Act of Parliament was required. Nevertheless the Supreme Court sat in full, all 11 members, to hear what even the sober Constitution Unit was calling the case of the century. Well, the appeal failed, and by a decisive margin of eight votes ...

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