Genes and Memes

John Maynard Smith, 4 February 1982

The Extended Phenotype 
by Richard Dawkins.
Freeman, 307 pp., £9.95, December 1981, 0 7167 1358 6
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... is all this ‘repetitive’ DNA doing? No doubt much of it will turn out to perform some as yet unknown function useful to the organism. The novel suggestion is that much of it may be ‘selfish’, or ‘parasitic’. A cell is full of enzymic machinery for replicating DNA. Dawkins suggests that DNA molecules, which, unlike typical genes, contribute ...

Women against Men

Anita Brookner, 2 September 1982

The Golden Notebook 
by Doris Lessing.
Joseph, 638 pp., £9.95, July 1982, 0 7181 0970 8
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... make a conscious effort not to think about her. This is when she knows her attitude towards this unknown woman is despicable: she feels triumph over her, pleasure that she has taken Paul from her. When Ella first becomes conscious of this emotion she is so appalled and ashamed that she buries it, fast. Yet the shadow of the third grows again, and it becomes ...
... false views. Hungarians, however, to use a phrase of Endre Ady – a great poet still largely unknown abroad, and yet the equal of Baudelaire or Apollinaire – a phrase that is oft quoted in Hungary, want to be ‘seen, seeing’.   Here we are right at the centre of the Gordian knot. What I have in mind is translation ... Europa is a Budapest ...

Pareto and Elitism

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 3 July 1980

The Other Pareto 
edited by Placido Bucolo.
Scolar, 308 pp., £15, April 1980, 0 85967 516 5
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Elitism 
by G. Lowell Field and John Higley.
Routledge, 135 pp., £6.95, May 1980, 0 7100 0487 7
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Elites in Australia 
by John Higley and Don Smart.
Routledge, 317 pp., £9.50, July 1979, 9780710002228
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... Higley and his co-authors identified 418 members of a central circle, invisible and indeed unknown to its members but a social fact nevertheless, they assure us, ‘in the sense that each of its many members was linked to at least two others who were directly linked themselves’. This circle, although it excluded the unsociable leaders of trades ...

Pity the monsters

Richard Altick, 18 December 1980

The Elephant Man 
by Bernard Pomerance.
Faber, 71 pp., £2.25, June 1980, 0 571 11569 1
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The Elephant Man: the Book of the Film 
by Joy Kuhn.
Virgin, 90 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 9780907080091
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The Elephant Man 
by Christine Sparks.
Futura, 272 pp., £1.25, August 1980, 0 7088 1942 7
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The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences 
by Frederick Treves.
Star, 126 pp., £95, August 1980, 0 352 30747 1
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The Elephant Man and Other Freaks 
by Sian Richards.
Futura, 197 pp., £1.25, October 1980, 0 7088 1927 3
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The True History of the Elephant Man 
by Michael Howell and Peter Ford.
Allison and Busby, 190 pp., £6.95, March 1980, 0 85031 353 8
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... document the life of an exhibited freak. The authors’ luck in discovering so much hitherto unknown information seems, in a way, a spin-off from the good fortune that distinguished the last years of Merrick’s life from the fate of most freaks. It was the mere accident of his being shown for twopence in a vacant shop across the road from the London ...

Antediluvianism

J.M. Roberts, 22 January 1981

Europe: Privilege and Protest 1730-1789 
by Olwen Hufton.
Fontana, 398 pp., £2.50, May 1980, 0 00 636109 9
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... in 1789 (our sophisticated doubts about the Revolution being ‘victorious’ in any sense were unknown even a couple of decades ago). ‘Losers’ (the Papacy, rulers who failed to carry out reforms, social conservatives with uncomprehended points of view) got bad marks and less attention. The received notion of the 18th century, in fact, was a typical ...

Did Darwin get it right?

John Maynard Smith, 18 June 1981

... its legs off the ground and not fall over. The alternative view would be that there are (as yet unknown) laws of form or development which permit only certain kinds of organisms to exist – for example, organisms with internal skeletons, dorsal nerve cords and four legs, or with external skeletons, ventral nerve cords and six legs – and which forbid all ...

Mothering

Peter Laslett, 6 August 1981

L’Amour en plus 
by Elisabeth Badinter.
Flammarion (Paris), 372 pp., £6.80, May 1980, 2 08 064279 0
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Mari et Femme dans la Société Paysanne 
by Martine Segalen.
Flammarion, 211 pp., £6.30, May 1980, 2 08 210957 7
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... we now experience, that the character and pace of change in attitude or practice are simply unknown to us, and remain so forever? As of the present, the historical sociologist can be more confident about the existence of brother-sister marriage in Roman Egypt than he can about possible changes in the parenting practices of whole populations as recently ...

Manly Scowls

Patrick Parrinder, 6 February 1986

An Artist of the Floating World 
by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Faber, 206 pp., £9.95, February 1986, 0 571 13608 7
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Revolutionary Road 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 337 pp., £4.50, January 1986, 0 413 59720 2
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Young Hearts Crying 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 347 pp., £9.95, January 1986, 9780413597304
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Ellen 
by Ita Daly.
Cape, 144 pp., £8.95, January 1986, 0 224 02833 2
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... the bread-knife and kills her, making it look, however, as if the murder had been committed by an unknown intruder. The Garda question her, but soon lose interest. Her life, to outward appearance, goes on much as before. People don’t do things like that? Oscar Wilde, for one, thought that they did: Some do the deed with many tears, And some without a ...

Torches for Superman

Raymond Williams, 21 November 1985

By the Open Sea 
by August Strindberg, translated by Mary Sandbach.
Secker, 193 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 436 50008 6
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August Strindberg 
by Olof Lagercrantz, translated by Anselm Hollo.
Faber, 399 pp., £20, September 1984, 0 571 11812 7
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Strindberg: A Biography 
by Michael Meyer.
Secker, 651 pp., £25, October 1985, 0 436 27852 9
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... a writer, where it is easy – as with many Modernist gestures and assumptions – to mistake the unknown for the universal. Thus to follow Strindberg’s life and writing before, say, 1885 will be to most readers who know only the work of the next period, typically The Father and Miss Julie, surprising. He was 34 when he left Stockholm for France, in ...

History and Hats

D.A.N. Jones, 23 January 1986

The Lover 
by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray.
Collins, 123 pp., £7.95, November 1985, 0 00 222946 3
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Stones of the Wall 
by Dai Houying, translated by Frances Wood.
Joseph, 310 pp., £9.95, August 1985, 0 7181 2588 6
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White Noise 
by Don DeLillo.
Picador, 326 pp., £9.95, January 1986, 0 330 29109 2
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... another: ‘The music spread all over the dark boat, like a heavenly injunction whose import was unknown, like an order from God whose meaning was inscrutable.’ The magic of French sound has gone. Here is another passage which goes better into English: ‘Some birds are shrieking at the tops of their voices, crazy birds. As they sharpen their beaks on ...

Holy Relics

Alan Milward, 3 April 1986

Selling Hitler: The story of the Hitler Diaries 
by Robert Harris.
Faber, 402 pp., £10.95, February 1986, 0 571 13557 9
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... Hitler drawings. You will find some of his best work in Billy F. Price’s Adolf Hitler, the Unknown Artist (Houston, 1984). He was also writing Hitler mottoes, postcards and poems. Many of these you may find in the immense compilation, E. Jäckel and A. Kuhn (eds), Hitler – Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924 (Stuttgart, 1980). ‘He who believes in ...
The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature 
by William Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews.
Oxford, 740 pp., £30, June 1986, 0 19 554233 9
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... for the first hundred, and still contains few writers of the first quality, with even those mostly unknown outside Australia until recently. Compare this with its model, covering up to more than a thousand years and an enormous body of writers, among them some of the greatest geniuses in European literature. Add to this that a companion to English writing has ...

Lyrics and Ironies

Christopher Ricks, 4 December 1986

The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony 
by D.J. Enright.
Oxford, 178 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 19 212253 3
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Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric 
by Donald Davie.
Cambridge, 76 pp., £15, September 1986, 0 521 32264 2
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... doctor who hesitated because his horse, frightened by dogs, shied as he was on his way to treat an unknown farmer who happened to have a daughter? A stumbling or shying horse is no more than an unbrushed, ill-educated coincidence. Enright is himself markedly uncensorious, though pleased as Punch when an anecdote will not stay still: ‘A music publisher ...

A Kind of Integrity

Jonathan Barnes, 6 November 1986

Philosophical Apprenticeships 
by Hans-Georg Gadamer, translated by Robert Sullivan.
MIT, 198 pp., £13.95, October 1985, 0 262 07092 8
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The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy 
by Hans-Georg Gadamer, translated by Christopher Smith.
Yale, 182 pp., £18, June 1986, 0 300 03463 6
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... of a theoria whose ontological legitimation may be found only in an intellectus infinitus that is unknown to an existential experience unsupported by revelation. This model must also be held out as a contrast to all those who bend human reasonableness to the methodical thinking of ‘anonymous’ science. In opposition to the perfecting of the logical ...