Vile Bodies

Rosemary Dinnage, 18 September 1980

Prostitution is not going to disappear for a long time, says one of the six women who tells her story here, so it is time people accepted prostitutes. ‘They could at least be ready to look...

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Frege and Analytical Philosophy

Michael Dummett, 18 September 1980

In the course of 1936, Professor Heinrich Scholz of Münster completed the collection of Frege’s unpublished writings, of which he had charge, by obtaining from those, such as Russell...

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Kripke versus Kant

Richard Rorty, 4 September 1980

When these lectures were first published eight years ago (in a collection), they stood analytic philosophy on its ear. Everybody was either furious, or exhilarated, or thoroughly perplexed. No...

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English Protestantism

J.B. Trapp, 4 September 1980

Towards the end of 1533, Sir Thomas More turned to write the last of his harsh rejoinders to a pamphlet attack, printed abroad, on the Catholic doctrine of the eucharist. He did not know who the...

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France’s Favourite Criminal

Douglas Johnson, 7 August 1980

The summer of 1979 was fine, so far as the French were concerned. In the great annual reshuffle of the social norms, which they have turned into a ritual with all the characteristics of a cult,...

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English Marxists in dispute

Roy Porter, 17 July 1980

The Englishness of English historians lies in their eclecticism. Few would admit to being unswerving Marxists, Freudians, Structuralists, Cliometricians, Namierites, or even Whigs. Most believe...

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Modern Discontent

Bernard Williams, 17 July 1980

All around him in American society Lasch sees intellectual and moral feebleness, cultural decay, despair and inner rage. There is no personal love, only a snatching at gratification, or domestic...

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Necessary Bishop

John Robinson, 3 July 1980

From time to time, clergymen of the Church of England attain notoriety by reason of the fact that they stick out to the left or the right or ahead of their contemporaries. They are the glory, the...

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Bloom’s Gnovel

Marilyn Butler, 3 July 1980

Harold Bloom of Yale has become strangely hard to avoid. Eloquent, prolific, charismatic, he is unmistakably one of the leading living mandarins of literary criticism. His manner of writing has...

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Trashing the Supreme Court

Ronald Dworkin, 19 June 1980

This is a great best-seller in America. But it is a deplorable book – mostly silly gossip about the various Justices of the United States Supreme Court in the period from 1969 to 1976,...

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Exact Walking

Christopher Hill, 19 June 1980

In 16th-century England Protestant theology was overwhelmingly predestinarian. ‘Calvinist’ is the word normally used, but Dr Kendall, as we shall see, is unhappy about it. Bishops...

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This, the companion volume to The Discipline of Law, completes Lord Denning’s current legal testament – his witness, until his next book, to the cause of justice. He writes on...

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Animal Happiness

Brigid Brophy, 5 June 1980

You possess two pain-killing injections and you encounter two casualties of an earthquake. Should you administer a shot apiece or give both to the person in the worse pain? Alternatively, you...

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Meyer Schapiro’s Mousetrap

Gabriel Josipovici, 5 June 1980

I have always thought that there was a striking resemblance between Freud’s earliest case histories, which he published as Studies in Hysteria, and the Sherlock Holmes stories. In the

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The concerns of academic philosophy are to some degree the concerns of everybody. At the same time, they often appear to plain pre-philosophical men and women – including those perhaps not...

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No scientist worth his research grant really wants to conceal his discoveries from the world at large. Many non-scientists are curious to know something of the latest scientific discoveries....

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Ireland’s Invisibilities

Owen Dudley Edwards, 15 May 1980

Dr R.B. McDowell knows and tells far too many relevant good stories to require the enhancement of his prose by specimens of the ‘Irish bulls’ of Sir Boyle Roche, who single-handedly...

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High Time for Reform

Rosalind Mitchison, 1 May 1980

There are two interwoven stories here. One is the ostensible one of the activities and developing ideas of the various radicals, seen during the years in which these men reached some...

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