Search Results

“... Thanks to David Mamet’s new play Oleanna, the distracted, bumbling and self-regarding male professor has now become the archetypal victim of political correctness. Mamet’s John is victimised by Carol, the ultimate female intellectual mediocrity who gets her revenge on his patronising didacticism by turning him in to the university tenure committee on grounds of sexual impropriety ...”

“... In 1989, François Furet was frequently hailed (or criticised, depending on the context) as the ‘king’ of the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. He seemed to be everywhere, on television, in the newspapers, and adorning the pages of almost every glossy magazine. Foreign reporters featured him in pieces on the celebration. Even his absence from the international scholarly meeting at the Sorbonne in July of that year merited a comment in Le Monde ...”

“... There is no doubt an art of political slander, as Robert Darnton terms it, and in many places something like what Charles Walton calls a ‘culture of calumny’. But in what ways are they particular to a time and place? How different, for example, are the charges of lesbianism and Machiavellian manoeuvring levelled against Hillary Clinton from those published two centuries earlier against Marie Antoinette (leaving aside for the moment the rather different outcomes for the two women)? True, Hillary was not accused of committing incest with her child, but she was linked with various financial scandals and even portrayed as ordering the murder of the deputy White House counsel Vince Foster (who committed suicide in 1993) in order to cover up her transgressions ...”

“... Almost all the contributors to The Invention of Pornography, a volume of essays edited by Lynn Hunt, are women. The result is curiously ambivalent. These are women looking at men looking at women, and although there is no explicit hint of scholarly retribution in thus exposing the male fascination with exposed female flesh, there is an implicit ...”

“... yet another suspect into the dock on suspicion of revolutionary activity has been all to the good. Lynn Hunt’s new book, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, is a case in point. Hunt, best known for her work on revolutionary political culture, has now turned to a subject which, almost by definition, resists ...”

“... If you want to understand the origins of modern human rights legislation, Lynn Hunt claims, the place to start is not the philosophical background, or the crises that the legislation addressed, but 18th-century fiction. The path she follows is not obvious, by any means – particularly as she has not chosen the fiction that most directly confronted issues of injustice (Candide, say, or Montesquieu’s Persian Letters ...”

“... of hundreds of scholars and every major professional association of history teachers. Lynn Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has condemned the plan because, among other things, George Washington is mentioned less frequently than Harriet Tubman, who led groups of slaves to freedom before the Civil War. Ms Cheney ...”

“... degree to which the public sphere invaded private life after 1789. For the Jacobins, as Lynn Hunt describes in a good opening chapter, the family was chiefly valuable as the forge of a virtuous citizenry. Happy mothers would bear children for the republic, breastfeed them, brainwash them, and joyously yield up their husbands and sons for the ...”

“... the galleys between 1685 and 1791 were incarcerated for participating in the underground economy. Hunt also touches on extra-European commerce, and on French traders’ conspicuous success in it immediately before and after the outbreak of the revolution. Between 1787 and 1792, the French had more ships in the Indian Ocean than both the Dutch and the ...”

“... Burke’s valuable and entertaining exercise in historical debunking. Yet the book also lacks what Lynn Hunt in particular has brought to bear on what might be called ‘The Fabrication of the French Revolution’: a sophisticated perspective on the way texts and symbols interact with deeply-grounded cultural habits. A case in point is the short shrift ...”

“... letters persuaded their many British readers to see the slave trade as morally problematic. As Lynn Hunt has argued, it was no coincidence that the rise of the novel and the rise of what would later be called ‘human rights’ occurred in tandem: learning to feel for people on the page was analogous to learning to feel for people in situations one ...”

“... from the stranger’s womb other than monsters? In The Family Romance of the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt explored the pamphlet literature in detail and observed all its contradictions. How can a vain, half-educated and frivolous woman become a ‘political tarantula’, and exercise a demonic cleverness in affairs of state? But no one at the time was ...”

“... in the shoe industry? Because of a division of labour established in the 18th century. The town of Lynn was a small producer of shoes for market by 1750. Demand rose with resistance to British trade regulations, encouraging New England ‘patriots’ to buy local products. Just after the War of Independence, in 1784, a protective tariff helped the young ...”

“... the working-class boyo, penetrated the middle classes, beginning with the ‘rivetingly glamorous Lynn Barber’, a future journalist who never forgot the experience. Onward and upward: bent aristos, dopers with great collections of blues records. A brief affair with the daughter of the champion of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill, Master of ...”

“... and affectionate stalking of the young animal that has its helpless parallel in the horrible hunt for the fugitive child himself at the end of the story. Cruelty and savagery are woven into the action, and are inseparable from human love. This intrinsic quality of the ‘altering’ that is the growing-up into an adult estate is brought home by a ...”