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Sex is best when you lose your head

James Meek, 16 November 2000

Promiscuity: An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition and Sexual Conflict 
by Tim Birkhead.
Faber, 272 pp., £9.99, May 2000, 0 571 19360 9
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... male inseminates a female, the rapist’s sperm and his own enter the female together. It is not unknown for males to be raped by other males while in the act of copulating with a female. It isn’t always so violent or so sordid. In Australia, there’s a certain species of wren in which two-thirds of chicks are, so to speak, bastards, fathered by males ...

Diary

Jeremy Harding: Anxiety in the Dordogne, 9 May 2002

... Town Hall suggested. In other words, it was important for FN voters that their choice go entirely unknown, because it would be seen as shameful, or at least controversial. Mme G told me that she liked to go through the results in the local paper, looking for the very smallest returns, and speculating as to whose grandmother was pitted against whose first ...

O Wyoming Whipporwill

Claire Harman: George Barker, 3 October 2002

The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Barker 
by Robert Fraser.
Cape, 573 pp., £25, February 2002, 0 224 06242 5
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... a few minutes. He left at the first opportunity, fleeing to California at the expense of an as yet unknown young Canadian admirer called Elizabeth Smart. Smart had read Barker’s poems and fallen in love with their author at a distance, determining in advance to bear him children on the grounds that they ‘would all be wonderful poets’. Her fixation might ...

Diary

Mary Beard: Set in Tunisia, 14 December 2006

... of text, and authentic archaic spellings, which they could only have found in obscure collections unknown even to many classicists. The problem is that the details don’t quite add up. This is not just a question of all the buildings being set askew, at a very un-Roman angle (fair enough – cameras need to be able to get all-round shots and angle views). It ...

Behaving like Spiders

Tim Flannery: The Holocene summer of social evolution, 24 June 2004

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilisation 
by Brian Fagan.
Granta, 284 pp., £20, May 2004, 1 86207 644 8
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... on their way south to the Cape of Good Hope. In that stormy region, 25-metre-high waves are not unknown – ‘walls of water so steep and powerful that they have cracked supertanker hulls like eggshells’ – and in such conditions, Fagan tells us, ‘our small boat’s chances would be better than the tanker’s,’ with the massive waves passing ...

Beasts or Brothers?

J.H. Elliott: When Columbus Met the Natives, 3 July 2008

The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus 
by David Abulafia.
Yale, 379 pp., £25, April 2008, 978 0 300 12582 5
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Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil 
edited and translated by Neil Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier.
Duke, 206 pp., £12.99, September 2008, 978 0 8223 4231 1
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... tradition and the shock of the new – and also about the evolving attitudes towards the hitherto unknown peoples of America, as Europeans, and Spaniards in particular, tried to establish criteria for assessing their rational capacity and to find arguments that would justify their domination and exploitation. Columbus’s real and imaginary worlds, and his ...

Sticky Wicket

Charles Nicholl: Colonel Fawcett’s Signet Ring, 28 May 2009

The Lost City of Z 
by David Grann.
Simon and Schuster, 339 pp., £16.99, February 2009, 978 1 84737 436 3
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... was lame and exhausted. After resting a few days they set off eastwards, into difficult and unknown country. The Kalapalos reported seeing smoke from their camp fires for five days, and then nothing on the sixth day. They indicated to Dyott, in sign language, their belief that the party had been massacred. Dyott considered it the most likely ...

Witchiness

Marina Warner: Baba Yaga, 27 August 2009

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg 
by Dubravka Ugrešić, translated by Ellen Elias Bursác, Celia Hawkesworth and Mark Thompson.
Canongate, 327 pp., £14.99, May 2009, 978 1 84767 066 3
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... Koshchey the Deathless (Roman Jakobson estimated that a third of Russian fairy tales were unknown outside the country). Pushkin, Leskov, Platonov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinksy, Kandinsky and Chagall drew inspiration from the oral literature polite society had hitherto left in the fields or the kitchen. They were influenced not only by the stories ...

Was He Quite Ordinary?

Mary Beard: Marcus Aurelius, 23 July 2009

Marcus Aurelius: Warrior, Philosopher, Emperor 
by Frank McLynn.
Bodley Head, 684 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 0 224 07292 2
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... and Fronto themselves, he does not stop to point out that the dates of many of them are either unknown or disputed – that you cannot, for very obvious reasons, simply string them together into a narrative. It is surely the job of all biographers to explain what lies behind their own reconstruction of their subject’s life: biography is always as much ...

Anti-Magician

Geoffrey Hawthorn: Max Weber, 27 August 2009

Max Weber: A Biography 
by Joachim Radkau, translated by Patrick Camiller.
Polity, 683 pp., £25, January 2009, 978 0 7456 4147 8
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... in 1895 in a politically charged lecture at Freiburg, ‘the words written over the portal to the unknown future of human history’ are Dante’s lasciate ogni speranza. The lecture formally inaugurated a professorship in political economy that Weber had secured through research that he’d done for what we would now call an influential think tank, the ...

How to Serve Coffee

Rory Stewart: Aleppan Manners, 16 February 2017

Aleppo Observed: Ottoman Syria through the Eyes of Two Scottish Doctors, Alexander and Patrick Russell 
by Maurits H. van den Boogert.
Arcadian Library, 254 pp., £120, September 2015, 978 0 19 958856 5
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... tails to people’s heads, flung impressive-sounding names around, and invented ‘new bones unknown in the European skeleton’. But they also observe that the refusal of Arab doctors to follow modern Western medical science probably ‘saved them the fruitless labour of wading through the ingenious and exploded theories’ fashionable in Europe ...

Who supplies the news?

Patrick Cockburn: Misreporting in Syria and Iraq, 2 February 2017

... the rebel enclave. The murder of 85 civilians confirmed by multiple sources and the killing of an unknown number of people with bombs and shells were certainly atrocities. But it remains a gross exaggeration to compare the events in East Aleppo – as journalists and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic did in December – with the mass slaughter of ...

Jack in the Belfry

Terry Eagleton, 8 September 2016

The Trials of the King of Hampshire: Madness, Secrecy and Betrayal in Georgian England 
by Elizabeth Foyster.
Oneworld, 368 pp., £20, September 2016, 978 1 78074 960 0
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... When the young daughter of one of his workmen was dying, the earl, to whom the girl was a complete unknown, insisted on being present at her death and had to be forcibly prevented from entering the house by her outraged father. The workman was able to allow his daughter to die in peace, but only at the cost of not being present at her deathbed ...

The HPtFtU

Christopher Tayler: Francis Spufford, 6 October 2016

Golden Hill 
by Francis Spufford.
Faber, 344 pp., £16.99, May 2016, 978 0 571 22519 4
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... sexually deviant, and reveals himself to be on a mission of redemption before leaving for parts unknown, Smith bears a slight resemblance to you-know-who as sketched in Unapologetic, though – with a C.S. Lewis-like disdain for mythological niceties – he’s also likened to a folkloric trickster and makes his exit on a sleigh on Christmas Day. If the ...

We’ll win or lose it here

Robert F. Worth: Lessons from Tahrir Square, 21 September 2017

The City Always Wins 
by Omar Robert Hamilton.
Faber, 312 pp., £14.99, August 2017, 978 0 571 33517 6
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Chronicle of a Last Summer: A Novel of Egypt 
by Yasmine El Rashidi.
Tim Duggan, 181 pp., £11.70, June 2017, 978 0 7704 3729 9
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... and gristle of Chicago: the jazz that is beauty in the destruction of the past, the jazz of an unknown future, the jazz that promises freedom from the bad old times. This may have been an appealing urban serenade to young vloggers in 2011, but only if they had their eyes tightly closed and headphones on. It is not the history-burdened, misery-stained city ...

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