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The Name of the Beast

Armand Marie Leroi, 11 December 1997

Buffon 
by Jacques Roger.
Cornell, 492 pp., £39.50, August 1997, 0 8014 2918 8
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The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination 
by Harriet Ritvo.
Harvard, 274 pp., £19.95, November 1997, 0 674 67357 3
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... to be ordered into a book. Ritvo makes much of writers like Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Bewick and William Frederick Martyn to advance her claim that there was resistance to the ‘hegemonic juggernaut’ of Linnaean classification. But in telling this tale of brave outsider plurality v. the chilly autocracy of establishment systematists, and in being so eager ...

That, there, is me

Alison Jolly: Primate behaviour, 20 September 2001

Tree of Origin: What Primate Behaviour Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution 
edited by Frans de Waal.
Harvard, 311 pp., £20.50, August 2001, 0 674 00460 4
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The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist 
by Frans de Waal.
Allen Lane, 433 pp., £16.99, June 2001, 0 7139 9569 6
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... though it was not until 1965 that Kawai publicly called it ‘pre-cultural’ behaviour. In 1992, William McGrew summarised chimpanzee tool differences in different regions. West African chimps crack nuts using stones as hammers, and other stones or tree-roots as anvils. East African chimps do not. The same nut-tree species grow in East Africa, there are ...

Desperate Character

J. Hoberman: Rambunctious R. Crumb, 20 November 2025

Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life 
by Dan Nadel.
Scribner, 458 pp., £25, May, 978 1 9821 4400 5
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... bow tie and stingy-brimmed fedora, he seemed freakishly straight – an American type not unlike William Burroughs or David Lynch. The film featured interviews with his older brother, Charles (who had killed himself by the time it was released), and his younger brother, Maxon. It also included Robert Hughes’s pronouncement that Crumb was a latter-day ...

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

... Birmingham. Fewer than half of its 350,000 citizens described themselves in the last census as ‘white British’. A third are foreign-born. It has almost as many Hindus as Muslims, and the irreligious are a larger group than the believers in any one of the big religions. All three of its MPs are Labour, among them Jon Ashworth, the shadow health ...

Think outside the bun

Colin Burrow: Quote Me!, 8 September 2022

The New Yale Book of Quotations 
edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
Yale, 1136 pp., £35, October 2021, 978 0 300 20597 8
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... the first English printed book) was The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, published by William Caxton in 1477, which grouped a miscellany of moral sayings under authorial headings. Many of the ‘quotations’ gathered in this ramshackle way would have made their ‘authors’ wince: Homer is said to have written ‘A good man is bettir thanne alle ...

Joe, Jerry and Bomber Blair

Owen Hatherley: Jonathan Meades, 7 March 2013

Museum without Walls 
by Jonathan Meades.
Unbound, 446 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 908717 18 4
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... of refined barbarians. The pantheon contains John Vanbrugh, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, S.S. Teulon, William Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of Italian Fascism Douglas Stephen, architect of a ...

Who plucked the little dog?

Tom Johnson: Kingship and its Discontents, 20 February 2025

Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State 
by Caroline Burt and Richard Partington.
Faber, 628 pp., £12.99, April, 978 0 571 31199 6
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... real feathers. The next year, celebrating Christmas with the archbishop of Canterbury, he wore a white buckram harness spangled with three hundred leaves of silver, adorned with one of his mottoes: ‘Hay hay the wythe swan/by godes soule I am thy man.’ Troupes of wodewose (green men) were arranged around him in a pageant, complete with virgins, elephants ...

Consulting the Furniture

Rosemary Hill: Jim Ede’s Mind Museum, 18 May 2023

Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists 
by Laura Freeman.
Cape, 377 pp., £30, May, 978 1 78733 190 7
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... Jones was staying with the Edes they heard a crash. Ede at once sensed that Jones had knocked over William Staite Murray’s tall vase, Heron, which Murray had said should never be in ‘an atmosphere of nervousness’. Ede himself dropped the Poisson d’Or, denting the nose. (Brancusi fixed it.) The Ede circles overlapped only here and there with ...

Flournoy’s Complaint

Terry Castle, 23 May 1996

From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages 
by Théodore Flournoy, edited by Sonu Shamdasani.
Princeton, 335 pp., £33.50, February 1996, 0 691 03407 9
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... Flournoy (1854-1920), professor of psycho-physiology at the University of Geneva, friend of William James (and later Carl Jung) and enthusiastic debunker of putatively occult phenomena. Since the late 1880s Flournoy, whose deceptively chivalrous, self-effacing manner concealed a penetrating forensic intelligence, had eagerly sought a medium on whom to ...

The Sense of the Self

Galen Strawson, 18 April 1996

... source 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 ...

Competition is for losers

David Runciman: Silicon Valley Vampire, 23 September 2021

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power 
by Max Chafkin.
Bloomsbury, 400 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 1 5266 1955 6
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... for such an unlikely administration. For the position of chief science adviser, Thiel suggested William Happer, America’s most prominent climate sceptic and a man who had compared the demonisation of fossil fuels to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. Trump eventually fobbed off Happer with a lowlier position, and even that proved too much: Happer left the ...

Red Pill, Blue Pill

James Meek, 22 October 2020

... story bears similarities to the influential American conspiracist text Behold a Pale Horse by William Cooper (which was published at about the time Icke reinvented himself as a prophet), and to the pseudo-leaks that drive QAnon, though QAnon tends to avoid the extraterrestrial. A cursory and much rationalised summary of Icke’s conspiracy theory goes ...

I eat it up

Joanne O’Leary: Delmore Schwartz’s Decline, 21 November 2024

The Collected Poems 
by Delmore Schwartz, edited by Ben Mazer.
Farrar, Straus, 699 pp., £40, April 2024, 978 0 374 60430 1
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... Even fruit could not escape his portentousness. He liked apples on account of their ‘snow-white meat and ruddy cover’, but it was ‘a metaphysical appetite, for I do not care for their taste’.Schwartz sometimes worried that his intellectualism was willed rather than authentic. In his autobiographical notes, he described ‘trying as before to ...

Plot 6, Row C, Grave 15

Malcolm Gaskill: Death of an Airman, 8 November 2018

... air – a letter dropped by the Austrians stated simply that he and his observer, 2nd Lieutenant William Watkins, had been niedergeschossen and were dead. Whether they were killed instantly or died of wounds is unclear. In October 1918 two periodicals devoted to the new art of aviation, the Aeroplane and Flight, reported that Fernald had ‘died as a ...

A Djinn speaks

Colm Tóibín: What about George Yeats?, 20 February 2003

Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats 
by Ann Saddlemyer.
Oxford, 808 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 19 811232 7
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... the spirit world. When, in 1905, during a séance in Boston, a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and ...

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