Not at Home

Emma Smith: Shipwrecked in Illyria, 16 February 2023

... with the play’s own title. Both the printing of the play in the First Folio, and the law student John Manningham’s account of the production at Middle Temple in 1602, stress that the play’s full title is Twelfth Night, or What You Will – with the suggestion that the second phrase modifies the first rather than substitutes for it. In 1662 Samuel Pepys ...

Even Immortality

Thomas Laqueur: Medicomania, 29 July 1999

The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present 
by Roy Porter.
HarperCollins, 833 pp., £24.99, February 1999, 0 00 637454 9
Show More
Show More
... Punic Wars. As late as the Twenties there were only four chemotherapeutic compounds. To be sure, major killers disappeared periodically but not through the agency of doctors or the power of science. Thus in medicine – unlike physics, chemistry or engineering – an immense accumulation of learning from the scientific revolution to our own century had ...

Tibbles

Barbara Everett, 17 October 1985

Alexander Pope 
by Maynard Mack.
Yale, 975 pp., £15.95, August 1985, 0 300 03391 5
Show More
Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ 
by A.D. Nuttall.
Allen and Unwin, 250 pp., £15, February 1984, 0 04 800017 5
Show More
The Last and Greatest Art: Some Unpublished Poetical Manuscripts of Alexander Pope 
by Maynard Mack.
Associated University Presses, 454 pp., £48.95, June 1984, 0 87413 183 9
Show More
The New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse 
by Roger Lonsdale.
Oxford, 870 pp., £15, November 1984, 0 19 214122 8
Show More
Collected in Himself: Essays Critical, Biographical and Bibliographical on Pope and Some of his Contemporaries 
by Maynard Mack.
Associated University Presses, 569 pp., £26.50, March 1983, 0 87413 182 0
Show More
Show More
... slightly more objectively when he summarises the poet’s life after youth as ‘a steady march of major works and a most unedifying and intricate mess of quarrel and intrigue’. Mack’s ‘advocacy’ of the poet makes him choose to interpret this history in terms of a psychology less literary than largely social. ‘The poet in his world’ consists in a ...

Bloody Sunday Report

Murray Sayle: Back to Bloody Sunday, 11 July 2002

... introduced himself and his two colleagues of the tribunal, Justices William Hoyt of Canada and John Toohey of New South Wales, the last a member of a well-known Catholic family of lawyers, journalists and brewers. All three wore business suits and asked occasional sharp questions. Behind the bench loomed the ninety-odd volumes of Widgery Tribunal ...

Ghosts in the Palace

Tom Nairn, 24 April 1997

... cart as well. We can’t be sure about this yet, in the darkling subsidence of Majorism. However, John Redwood, Sir George Gardiner and Michaels Howard and Portillo are scarcely arguments against the view. ‘The source of the authority and legitimacy of government ... the personification of the nation ... an institution vital to our national ...

King of Cannibal Island

John Lanchester: Will the AI bubble burst?, 25 December 2025

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip 
by Stephen Witt.
Bodley Head, 248 pp., £25, April 2025, 978 1 84792 827 6
Show More
The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant 
by Tae Kim.
Norton, 261 pp., £25, December 2024, 978 1 324 08671 0
Show More
Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination 
by Karen Hao.
Allen Lane, 482 pp., £25, May 2025, 978 0 241 67892 3
Show More
Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race that Will Change the World 
by Parmy Olson.
Pan Macmillan, 319 pp., £10.99, July 2025, 978 1 0350 3824 4
Show More
Show More
... it with the correct label, and adjusted itself using an algorithm called backpropagation. The major breakthrough came when researchers learned how to train networks with many layers of artificial neurons – ‘deep learning’. These deep networks could detect increasingly complex patterns in data, which led to dramatic progress in image recognition and ...

Women beware men

Margaret Anne Doody, 23 July 1992

Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women 
by Susan Faludi.
Chatto, 592 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 7011 4643 5
Show More
The War against Women 
by Marilyn French.
Hamish Hamilton, 229 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 241 13271 1
Show More
Show More
... harder edges of Thatchersim have been rubbed into a certain fubsiness by a ‘kinder, gentler’ John Major. What seems to be gathering power among the middle and professional classes is a new republicanism, a desire for a complete political representation of the Whig dream. This was Margaret Thatcher’s dream also, and why she cried (when given the ...

The Great Mary

Dinah Birch, 13 September 1990

Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-Eminent Edwardian 
by John Sutherland.
Oxford, 432 pp., £16.99, August 1990, 0 19 818587 1
Show More
Show More
... an eating insecurity, a covetous desire to earn acceptance and approval from those in authority. John Sutherland points to this paradox as the driving force behind Mary Ward’s extraordinary career. He isn’t inclined to condone the various obstinacies that made ‘The Great Mary’ (Pound’s term) so scorned among the writers who followed her. Her moral ...

Hue and Cry

Arthur C. Danto, 12 May 1994

Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction 
by John Gage.
Thames and Hudson, 335 pp., £38, October 1993, 0 500 23654 2
Show More
Show More
... that they could look like each other – Botticelli’s work being unmistakably quattrocento. John Gage suggests, on the evidence of Pliny’s account, that ‘Apelles was clearly one of those rare Greek artists whose works could be vividly imagined.’ I am doubtful about this. Pliny seems to have inferred from the austerity of means the austerity of ...

Diary

Tobias Jones: San Giovanni Rotondo, 13 May 1999

... big event (and even the Serie A game between Roma and Inter postponed to the following day). Pope John Paul II is to celebrate a televised mass in St Peter’s, and then travel down to San Giovanni Rotondo to celebrate Mass there. The millions of pellegrini in attendance are to be transported by more than five thousand coaches (100 from Poland alone) and 19 ...

Midges

J.I.M. Stewart, 15 September 1983

M.R. James: An Informal Portrait 
by Michael Cox.
Oxford, 268 pp., £14.50, June 1983, 0 19 211765 3
Show More
Show More
... In later years the scene darkened. There was an intellectual restlessness abroad in the college. John Maynard Keynes appeared (from Eton, indeed, where he had been in Pop), and as a very junior fellow announced that he had ‘had a good look round this place and come to the conclusion that it’s pretty inefficient.’ Plainly, rows lay ahead, and Monty ...

Special Status

R.J. Berry, 21 February 1985

Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology 
HMSO, 103 pp., £6.40Show More
Human Procreation: Ethical Aspects of the New Techniques 
Oxford, 91 pp., £3.95, December 1984, 0 19 857608 0Show More
The Redundant Male 
by Jeremy Cherfas and John Gribbin.
Bodley Head, 197 pp., £9.95, May 1984, 9780370305233
Show More
Begotten of Made? Human Procreation and Medical Technique 
by Oliver O’Donovan.
Oxford, 88 pp., £2.50, June 1984, 0 19 826678 2
Show More
Show More
... you see?’ He raised a hand; his expression was solemn. ‘Bokansky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!’ The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. ‘You really know where you are. For the first time in history.’ He quoted the planetary motto. ‘Community, Identity, Stability.’ Grand words. Twenty-six years ago ...

Davitt’s Part

Charles Townshend, 3 June 1982

Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846-1882 
by T.W. Moody.
Oxford, 674 pp., £22.50, April 1982, 9780198223825
Show More
Show More
... developed, to the bafflement or anger of hard-line physical-force men like O’Donovan Rossa or John O’Leary. W.B. Yeats consigned Romantic Ireland to the grave with O’Leary: Davitt discovered its terminal weakness much earlier. He outgrew the Fenian romanticism of his youth – in Moody’s words, ‘the practical revolutionist in Davitt was disgusted ...

Visions

Charles Townshend, 19 April 1984

Theobald Wolfe Tone: Colonial Outsider 
by Tom Dunne.
Tower Books, 77 pp., $1.90, December 1982, 0 902568 07 8
Show More
Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France 
by Marianne Elliott.
Yale, 411 pp., £15, November 1982, 0 03 000270 2
Show More
De Valera and the Ulster Question 1917-1973 
by John Bowman.
Oxford, 369 pp., £17.50, November 1982, 0 19 822681 0
Show More
Sean Lemass and the Making of Modern Ireland 
by Paul Bew and Henry Patterson.
Gill, 224 pp., £15, November 1982, 0 7171 1260 8
Show More
Show More
... this ugly reality. Their incomplete mental adjustment to the fact of partition is the subject of John Bowman’s remarkable study. His revisionist stance may seem unnecessarily aggressive – it is after all no secret that in the private session of Dail Eireann on 22 December 1921 de Valera endorsed the so-called ‘county option’ – but he points out ...

Haig speaks back

Keith Kyle, 17 May 1984

Caveat 
by Alexander Haig.
Weidenfeld, 367 pp., £12.95, April 1984, 9780297783848
Show More
Show More
... of his senior cabinet member is made on more than casual acquaintance. It is well-known that John F. Kennedy met Dean Rusk for the first time when he interviewed him for the job: Reagan and Haig had seen each other three times before the Election of 1980 but on only one of these occasions, shortly before Reagan’s nomination, had there been anything ...