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Fugitive Crusoe

Tom Paulin: Daniel Defoe, 19 July 2001

Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions 
by Maximilian Novak.
Oxford, 756 pp., £30, April 2001, 0 19 812686 7
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Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe 
edited by W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank.
Pickering & Chatto, £595, December 2000, 1 85196 465 7
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... before he died in a Soho rooming-house, Hazlitt published a lengthy essay on a new biography of Daniel Defoe in the Edinburgh Review, where he remarked that in Robinson Crusoe Defoe abandoned the political and religious subjects he addressed in his pamphlets, and confined himself to ‘unsophisticated views of nature and the human heart’. Hazlitt’s ...

In place of fairies

Simon Schaffer, 2 December 1982

Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic 
by Daniel O’Keefe.
Martin Robertson, 581 pp., £17.50, September 1982, 0 85520 486 9
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Scienze, Credenze Occulti, Livelli di Cultura 
edited by Paola Zambelli.
Leo Olschki, 562 pp., April 1982, 88 222 3069 8
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... Daniel O’Keefe’s massive survey of magic not only tells us ‘how to do it’ but gives us some policy recommendations too. His book reads like the transcript of a Royal Commission report on the occult. It is not easy reading, but the effort is worthwhile. His advice extends to such fields as politics, economics and war: this scope gives some clue both to the structure and to the theme of Stolen Lightning ...

Into the Alley

Daniel Soar: Dashiell Hammett, 3 January 2002

Nightmare Town: Stories 
by Dashiell Hammett, edited by Kirby McCauley and Martin Greenberg et al.
Picador, 396 pp., £16.99, March 2001, 0 330 48109 6
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Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett 1921-60 
edited by Richard Layman and Julie Rivett.
Counterpoint, 650 pp., £28.99, June 2001, 1 58243 081 0
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... is that she talked him out of abandoning it. The parallel seems perfect. The book’s hero, Nick Charles, has taken early retirement from sleuthing to pursue his interest in alcohol. (Fans recommend playing a game as you read: to try to match him drink for drink. This would be dangerous.) Nick’s wife, Nora, who never knew him in his detecting ...

Great Instructor

Charles Nicholl, 31 August 1989

Ben Jonson: A Life 
by David Riggs.
Harvard, 399 pp., £27.95, April 1989, 0 674 06625 1
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... liberties, Shakespeare ‘wanted art’, Sharpham, Day and Dekker were ‘all rogues’, Samuel Daniel was ‘a good honest man, but no poet’ – but more importantly it provides the rudiments of autobiography. In Drummond, as in everyone else, there is that uncertain reaction. He is awe-struck yet curiously disappointed. Jonson’s flamboyance is there ...

Larks

Patricia Craig, 19 September 1985

But for Bunter 
by David Hughes.
Heinemann, 223 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 434 35410 4
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Bunter Sahib 
by Daniel Green.
Hodder, 272 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 340 36429 7
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The Good Terrorist 
by Doris Lessing.
Cape, 370 pp., £9.50, September 1985, 0 224 02323 3
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Unexplained Laughter 
by Alice Thomas Ellis.
Duckworth, 155 pp., £8.95, August 1985, 0 7156 2070 3
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Polaris and Other Stories 
by Fay Weldon.
Hodder, 237 pp., £8.95, August 1985, 0 340 33227 1
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... of the Magnet cast: for instance, we are asked to suppose that Frank Richards (his real name was Charles Hamilton, but Hughes affects not to know this), scouring Eton with a literary purpose in mind, came face to face with a boy called Anthony Eden and put him down on paper as Harry Wharton. (In fact, this isn’t too wide of the mark. ...

Voyage to Uchronia

Paul Delany, 29 August 1991

The Difference Engine 
by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.
Gollancz, 384 pp., £7.99, July 1991, 9780575050730
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... Lords’ appointed for life: Lord Darwin, Lord Bentham, Lord Brunel and above all Lord Babbage. Charles Babbage really lived, of course (though not as a Lord), and really invented merit lordship, the computer, and many other improvements in mechanism. All one needs to accept, to set this novel going, is that Babbage’s genius should be properly recognised ...

The Ballad of Andy and Rebekah

Martin Hickman: The Phone Hackers, 17 July 2014

... focused on thirty individual cases, including those involving three cabinet ministers, Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Prescott. Edis told the court that while their papers were busy hacking to find evidence of other people’s affairs – in January 2003 the Sun ran a story calling Andy Gilchrist, then leading the Fire Brigade Union in a series of strikes ...

A Message like You

Daniel Soar: Distrusting Character, 10 August 2023

Ten Planets 
by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman.
And Other Stories, 108 pp., £11.99, February, 978 1 913505 61 5
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... the way the reality effect is created with a character, but particularity helps here too. When Charles Bovary first sees Emma, he ‘was surprised by the whiteness of her fingernails. They were glossy, delicate at the tips, more carefully cleaned than Dieppe ivories, and filed into almond shapes.’ Obviously, this tells us something, with great ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: How to concoct a conspiracy theory, 20 October 2005

... free thinking and social fair dealing’. Tell that to the Muslim detainees in Belmarsh Prison. Daniel Pipes says that ‘Bat Ye’or has traced a nearly secret history of Europe over the past thirty years, convincingly showing how the Euro-Arab Dialogue has blossomed from a minor discussion group into the engine for the continent’s Islamisation.’ You ...

On Luljeta Lleshanaku

Michael Hofmann: Luljeta Lleshanaku, 4 April 2019

... who is ideally placed to traffic between the land of her birth and her adopted homeland, the way Charles Simic has done since the 1960s with Serbia (see his anthology of Serbian poetry, The Horse Has Six Legs, and his numerous single volumes of Lalic, Tadic, Ristovic, Salamun and many more). I wish her patience, talented originals, and many ...

Thousands of Little White Blobs

Daniel Pick, 23 November 1989

The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti 
by J.S. McClelland.
Unwin Hyman, 343 pp., £35, December 1988, 0 04 320188 1
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... on Hobson’s Imperial race. London, the heart of the Empire, as Hobson’s fellow new liberal, Charles Masterman, declared in The Condition of England (1909), was inhabited by that ‘homogeneous substance: the City Dweller’. This creature had strange crowd propensities which were a source of irresolvable mysteries and riddles. Moreover, ‘it is in the ...

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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... and as then amplified in aggressive (or even more aggressive) ways in America, by figures like Charles Davenport, director, from 1904, of the Carnegie-funded Cold Spring Harbor research station on Long Island. The quality of the writing here resides precisely in the area that some historians of science have found wanting: its biographical speculations. In ...

Havens

Daniel Kevles, 17 August 1989

Thinking about science: Max Delbrück and the Origins of Molecular Biology 
by Ernst Peter Fischer and Carol Lipson.
Norton, 334 pp., £13.95, January 1989, 9780393025088
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Is science necessary? Essays on Science and Scientists 
by M.F. Perutz.
Barrie and Jenkins, 285 pp., £14.95, July 1989, 0 7126 2123 7
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... rarely figured in modern biological inquiry, at least not in its Anglo-American mode. To be sure, Charles Darwin – despite his protestations to the contrary – had strong theoretical inclinations, but he constantly tested and modified his ideas against an enormous array of observational data. Max Perutz, who was for many years the director of the Medical ...

Gorilla with Mobile Phone

Theo Tait: Michel Houellebecq, 9 February 2006

Houellebecq non autorisé: enquête sur un phénomène 
by Denis Demonpion.
Maren Sell, 377 pp., €20, August 2005, 2 35004 022 4
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The Possibility of an Island 
by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd.
Weidenfeld, 345 pp., £12.99, November 2005, 0 297 85098 9
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... believed to be the hypocrisy of morality, sentiment, justice and pity. From this point of view, Charles Manson was not some monstrous aberration in the hippy movement, but its logical conclusion.’ ‘I’ve lived my life rather than his,’ Houellebecq’s father admits to Demonpion. ‘But I knew he was in good hands.’ Houellebecq always describes his ...

You can’t prove I meant X

Clare Bucknell, 16 April 2020

Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820 
by Thomas Keymer.
Oxford, 352 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 0 19 874449 8
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... Flecknoe (1682), with its delicate possible parallel between the dunce writer Richard Flecknoe and Charles II, but not Nero the Second. Charles can’t be twinned with Flecknoe as straightforwardly as George I with Nero but, as Keymer shows, it’s the non-straightforwardness of the parallel – the way it’s built up from ...

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