Physicke from Another Body

Michael Neill: Cannibal Tinctures, 1 December 2011

Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture 
by Louise Noble.
Palgrave Macmillan, 241 pp., £52, March 2011, 978 0 230 11027 4
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Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians 
by Richard Sugg.
Routledge, 374 pp., £24.99, June 2011, 978 0 415 67417 1
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... their followers do not accept, and the professor is searching for witch and demon cures which may be useful to us later’. It is to the investigation of such demonic remedies that the groundbreaking work of Louise Noble and Richard Sugg is devoted. The belief that a wide range of maladies could be cured by the ...

Shakespeare’s Sister

Elaine Showalter, 25 April 1991

Kate Chopin: A Life of the Author of ‘The Awakening’ 
by Emily Toth.
Century, 528 pp., £20, March 1991, 0 7126 4621 3
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... fever, there were six children. The young widow took over his business; Toth argues that she may also have had an affair with a married roué, Albert Sampite, possibly the model for the seducers in her fiction. If so, it did not last long. In 1884, she returned to St Louis, and began to write. Her early magazine fiction was genteel and uplifting, but her ...

Cervantics

Robert Taubman, 7 October 1982

Monsignor Quixote 
by Graham Greene.
Bodley Head, 221 pp., £5.95, September 1982, 0 370 30923 5
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... Half-belief is formally honoured in a visit to the tomb of Unamuno in Salamanca, but doubts may occur at any time: ‘How is it that when I speak of belief, I become aware always of a shadow, the shadow of disbelief haunting my belief?’ and ‘I am riddled by doubts. I am sure of nothing, not even of the existence of God ... Oh, I want to believe that ...

Contra Galton

Michael Neve, 5 March 1987

In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity 
by Daniel Kevles.
Penguin, 426 pp., £4.95, August 1986, 0 14 022698 2
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... to class interest, or, more important, racial supremacy. If the thing is a genuine mystery, if, as Richard Lewontin has written, ‘we know nothing more about genetic causes of difference in social status and power today than was known to Galton,’ then the history of biological engineering, and genetics, is merely an aspect of the history of class or race or ...

The Monte Lupo Story

Simon Schama, 18 September 1980

Faith, Reason and the Plague 
by Carlo Cipolla.
Harvester, 112 pp., £7.50, November 1980, 0 85527 506 5
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... the most recalcitrant and ostensibly ephemeral sources, ingenious and gifted historians such as Richard Cobb, Olwen Hufton and E.P. Thompson have produced masterpieces of historical reconstruction in which the lives of the obscure and the downtrodden are given the front of the stage. There was, and is, a serious purpose in viewing élite culture and its ...

Bliss

Michael Neve, 16 October 1980

My Guru and his Disciple 
by Christopher Isherwood.
Eyre Methuen, 338 pp., £8.50, July 1980, 0 413 46930 1
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... of as only partially understood. The Vedanta centre is where Isherwood began his training – in Richard Alpert’s expression, ‘to become nothing’. The world is seen as mad, and forces the weary traveller from Europe to subject himself to a difficult regime of retreat and quiet. A ‘homesickness for sanity’ is the one valid reason for putting oneself ...

Short Cuts

Andrew O’Hagan: Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book, 15 August 2019

... can be made to appear instantly substantial by the manner and speed of their promulgation. Richard Henriques, a former High Court judge, has just concluded his review of Scotland Yard’s handling of the allegations made by Carl Beech, who was recently sentenced to 18 years for falsely accusing a number of senior figures of abusing children. ‘Never ...

In His White Uniform

Rosemary Hill: Accidental Gods, 10 February 2022

Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine 
by Anna Della Subin.
Granta, 462 pp., £20, January 2022, 978 1 78378 501 8
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... and their reactions range from bewildered irritation to dismay. While the idea of being godlike may be attractive, being an actual god is less so. One is at the mercy of one’s worshippers, who tend to be demanding, dictatorial and impossible to shake off. Anna Della Subin’s Accidental Gods is a philosophical and historical exploration of the phenomenon ...

At Tate Britain

Anne Wagner: Conceptual Art in Britain, 1964-79, 14 July 2016

... more than others. It offers a rich array of choice, including such poetic and elusive pieces as Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking (1967); Victor Burgin’s subtly sensory All Criteria, first published in 1970 in a Camden Art Centre exhibition catalogue for a show called Idea Structures; and Stephen Willats’s astonishingly dynamic graphite anti-grid ...

Short Cuts

Inigo Thomas: At the Ladbroke Arms, 22 February 2018

... police preparations for the bank holiday weekend festival. ‘Committed historians’ was a phrase Richard Cobb used in The Police and the People to describe the police in France at the time of the Revolution. Their reports on crime and violence, in Cobb’s view, made them reliable witnesses, able to state what they had seen and heard, and to form an idea of ...

Who won the Falklands War?

Edward Luttwak, 23 April 1992

One Hundred Days: The Memoirs of the Falklands Battle Group Commander 
by Admiral Sandy Woodward and Patrick Robinson.
HarperCollins, 359 pp., £18, January 1992, 0 00 215723 3
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... both her grandfathers being admirals ... her uncle was Admiral Sir David Luce, and her brother Richard Luce, Minister of State at the Foreign Office.’ Lineage is of course the defining preoccupation of any aristocracy, and of non-aristocrats captive to aristocratic values, once a common type throughout Europe, now common only in Britain, although usually ...

Serried Yuppiedromes

Owen Hatherley: What happened to London?, 21 August 2014

Guide to the Architecture of London 
by Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward.
Phoenix, 511 pp., £16.99, July 2013, 978 1 78022 493 0
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... revival school of Aldo Rossi in Italy – and the New York Five, particularly Peter Eisenman and Richard Meier, with whom they shared an interest in theory. Initially, Jones, together with Jeremy Dixon and Michael Gold, worked for the firm of Frederick Macmanus and Partners, for whom they designed a glassy, Mediterranean block of flats and shops in Clipstone ...

When you die you’ll go to hell

Wendy Steiner, 27 May 1993

Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes 
by Helen Benedict.
Oxford, 309 pp., £22.50, February 1993, 0 19 506680 4
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Reproducing Rape: Domination through Talk in the Courtroom 
by Gregory Matoesian.
Polity, 256 pp., £45, February 1993, 0 7456 1036 6
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... Sticks and stones may break my bones ...’ Like most children, I learned this piece of wisdom with tears streaming down my face, hurt to the quick by the taunts of my playmates. At the time, it seemed a very foolish statement. What was this splitting of hurt into ‘real’ injury and ‘unreal’ feeling? I certainly felt hurt ...

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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... expect memes to ‘evolve’ phenotypic effects favourable to their own replication. However, it may make a crucial difference, as Dawkins acknowledges, that memes can replicate only by generating a phenotypic representation of themselves, whereas genes replicate by a direct template process. Dawkins’s meme concept has been criticised on the grounds that ...

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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... boys, so many girls, at deliberately decided intervals. Even the disposing of infants, therefore, may not have been incompatible with maternal or parental affection, any more than inflicting punishment or hardship was. It all depends, as it always must, on the culture, the attitude, the situation at the time: on the family concerned, on the personality of ...