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Into Your Enemy’s Stomach

Alexander Murray: Louis IX, 8 April 2010

Saint Louis 
by Jacques Le Goff, translated by Gareth Evan Gollrad.
Notre Dame, 947 pp., £61.95, February 2009, 978 0 268 03381 1
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... around 400 ad by holy men, like bishops, then by other categories, including those kings who may or may not have been saintly. Louis IX of France was the first major king to be made a saint. His reign, from 1226 to 1270, forms the middle episode in an unbroken success story for the French monarchy, a story which had ...

Scrivener’s Palsy

Carl Elliott: Take the red pill, 8 January 2004

Constructing RSI: Belief and Desire 
by Yolande Lucire.
New South Wales, 216 pp., £24.50, September 2002, 9780868407784
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Meaning, Medicine and the ‘Placebo Effect’ 
by Daniel Moerman.
Cambridge, 172 pp., £14.95, October 2002, 0 521 00087 4
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... of stage props?’ Then he adds, a little sadly: ‘The only difference is that our predecessors may have truly believed. I cannot believe; I know too much.’ This confession gets at a major problem faced by contemporary doctors. The more effective their medical technology, the less faith they have in the power of their office. Doctors have come to believe ...

I thought you were incredible

Bee Wilson: Elizabeth Taylor’s Magic, 16 November 2023

Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon 
by Kate Andersen Brower.
HarperCollins, 495 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 0 00 843582 0
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... is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men, some gay (like Rock Hudson), others heterosexual (like Farrell). Sometimes, Farrell took her to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had been ...

Sour Notes

D.A.N. Jones, 17 November 1983

Peter Hall’s Diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle 
edited by John Goodwin.
Hamish Hamilton, 507 pp., £12.95, November 1983, 0 241 11047 5
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... spouses, trying not to irritate the performers with ‘hairsplitting Notes’. Play directors may come to suppose that everything can be done by Notes. When I was a student I appeared in a play by Michael Codron, directed by his friend, Adrian Brown: just before we went on, Codron appeared to give us a Note. ‘Adrian is making this too heavy and ...

What did they name the dog?

Wendy Doniger: Twins, 19 March 1998

Twins: Genes, Environment and the Mystery of Identity 
by Lawrence Wright.
Weidenfeld, 128 pp., £14.99, November 1997, 0 297 81976 3
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... identical twins: Babies actually do get lost or separated, and, however rare such an event may be, when a person finds his twin it feeds the common fantasy that any one of us might have a clone, a doppelgänger; someone who is not only a human mirror but also an ideal companion; someone who understands me perfectly, almost perfectly, because he is ...

Social Poetry

Anthony Pagden, 15 October 1987

Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times 
by Krishan Kumar.
Blackwell, 506 pp., £24.50, January 1987, 0 631 14873 6
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Lectures on Ideology and Utopia 
by Paul Ricoeur, edited by George Taylor.
Columbia, 353 pp., £21.90, December 1986, 0 231 06048 3
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Visions of Harmony: A Study in 19th-Century Millenarianism 
by Anne Taylor.
Oxford, 285 pp., £25, February 1987, 0 19 211793 9
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... theory. They are, as Paul Ricoeur says, ‘social poetry’, a poetry which, in the end, ‘may dissolve politics’. And like all poetry they reject precise literary definition. For the historian of political thought this poses quite serious definitional problems, problems which Krishan Kumar’s book does little to resolve. The Golden Age, the Land of ...

Oxford University’s Long Haul

Sheldon Rothblatt, 21 January 1988

The History of the University of Oxford. Vol. I: The Early Oxford Schools 
edited by J.I. Catto.
Oxford, 684 pp., £55, June 1984, 0 19 951011 3
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The History of the University of Oxford. Vol. III: The Collegiate University 
edited by James McConia.
Oxford, 775 pp., £60, July 1986, 9780199510139
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The History of the University of Oxford. Vol. V: The 18th Century 
edited by L.S. Sutherland and L.G. Mitchell.
Oxford, 949 pp., £75, July 1986, 0 19 951011 3
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Learning and a Liberal Education: The Study of History in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester, 1880-1914 
by Peter Slee.
Manchester, 181 pp., £25, November 1986, 9780719018961
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... subject to delays. The obscure origins of the University are carefully reconstructed. In Sir Richard Southern’s distinction, Oxford was not ‘created’ – it ‘emerged’. The contributors explain the significance of its geographical location and its importance as a centre of legal activity. They discuss how it separated from the town and the ...

The Vice President’s Men

Seymour M. Hersh, 24 January 2019

... developing the US’s new maritime strategy, aimed at restricting Soviet freedom of movement. In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly ...

Human Welfare

Paul Seabright, 18 August 1983

Utilitarianism and Beyond 
edited by Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams.
Cambridge, 290 pp., £20, June 1982, 0 521 24296 7
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... Several writers point out that in realistic applications the pursuit of utilitarian consequences may well require the abandonment of any attempt to apply utilitarianism very directly. It is not quite clear what the import of this is supposed to be: the editors clearly think it an embarrassment to the theory, while others, like Hare, find it a positive ...

Fear of Rabid Dogs

Margaret Anne Doody, 18 August 1994

Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time 
by Marina Warner.
Vintage, 104 pp., £4.99, April 1994, 0 09 943361 3
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... to a friend: ‘The lonelier and the more isolated I am, the more I have come to love myths.’ We may puzzle over what Aristotle meant. Did he love folk-tales, religious stories or high-minded allegories? The Greek word mythos means (centrally) ‘story’ but all stories have or acquire meanings, and we tell ourselves stories all the time. A culture is the ...

Look at me

Raymond Fancher, 28 June 1990

Rebel with a Cause 
by H.J. Eysenck.
W.H. Allen, 310 pp., £14.95, March 1990, 1 85227 162 0
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... field open to him was psychology. Furious at the time, he now writes that ‘in retrospect all may have been for the best ... Competition in the hard sciences is much fiercer than in psychology’ and ‘it turned out to be quite easy to be a big fish in a small pond.’ In this ‘excessively easy’ new field Eysenck adopted a strategy ‘perhaps not to ...

Mansions in Bloom

Ruth Richardson, 23 May 1991

A Paradise out of a Common Field: The Pleasures and Plenty of the Victorian Garden 
by Joan Morgan and Alison Richards.
Century, 256 pp., £16.95, May 1990, 0 7126 2209 8
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Private Gardens of London 
by Arabella Lennox-Boyd.
Weidenfeld, 224 pp., £25, September 1990, 0 297 83025 2
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The Greatest Glasshouse: The Rainforest Recreated 
edited by Sue Minter.
HMSO, 216 pp., £25, July 1990, 0 11 250035 8
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Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale: Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, 1780-1865 
by Albion Urdank.
California, 448 pp., $47.50, May 1990, 0 520 06670 7
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... known, then this should be made clear. It would seem that country-house archives and other sources may yet yield good material for a more scholarly examination of such matters. So while the gardener and the cook in me found many points of interest, the historian found herself bristling with questions, almost all of which remained unanswered. How did the head ...

What’s the hurry?

Ed Regis, 24 June 1993

Dreams of a Final Theory 
by Steven Weinberg.
Radius, 260 pp., £16.99, January 1993, 0 09 177395 4
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... issues such as the nature of explanation, the sense in which an explanation or theory may be said to be ‘final’, and whether the end-product of science is a nice-sounding, though possibly false, story about nature, or on the contrary a true and valid account of the way things are. Whenever such matters are dealt with in science books, the ...

Neglect

Ian Hamilton, 26 January 1995

An Unmentionable Man 
by Edward Upward.
Enitharmon, 102 pp., £5.99, October 1994, 1 870612 64 7
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Journey to the Border 
by Edward Upward.
Enitharmon, 135 pp., £5.99, October 1994, 1 870612 59 0
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The Mortmere Stories 
by Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward.
Enitharmon, 206 pp., £7.99, October 1994, 1 870612 69 8
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... now earns his crust by penning self-serving memoirs of the Thirties, Highwood says to him: ‘I may not have read every article you’ve written or television talk you’ve given about the Thirties, but I have read and heard more than a few, and there wasn’t one that didn’t completely ignore me.’ At moments like this, we might be tempted to diagnose a ...

During the war and after the war

J.R. Pole, 11 January 1990

Oxford History of the United States. Vol. VI: Battle Cry of Freedom, The Civil War Era 
by James McPherson.
Oxford, 904 pp., $35, June 1988, 0 19 503863 0
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Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 
by Eric Foner.
Harper and Row, 690 pp., $21.95, April 1988, 0 06 015851 4
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... of generations, the Civil War will lose its chronological centrality in American history, and may well come to be regarded, not so much as the great crisis of the very principle and possibility of the Union, but rather as an early difficulty that had to be overcome – one of the Union’s teething troubles. James McPherson, who has spent most of his ...

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