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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Jon Elster’s Brisk Meditations

Bernard Williams, 1 May 1980

There are some pieces of logical or theoretical jargon which are marks of ideological allegiance – intellectual windsocks to display which way the wind is blowing the author. While...

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Law and Class

Francis Bennion, 1 May 1980

Roger King and Neill Nugent assemble material by which they seek to persuade us that there is such a thing as the middle class, and that in the 1970s, by use of legal process, it staged a revolt....

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Elizabethan Spirits

William Empson, 17 April 1980

Something badly needed has got left out from the great structure that Dame Frances Yates has been building as an exposition of her view of the Occult tradition. I have felt it since her book on...

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Ayer, Anscombe and Empiricism

Alasdair MacIntyre, 17 April 1980

Locke, Berkeley and Hume were three very different philosophers with very different preoccupations, modes of argument and attitudes towards the world. But by the middle of the 19th century it had...

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Christianity’s Doppelgänger

C.H. Roberts, 17 April 1980

In December 1945 an Egyptian peasant from the village of Al-Qasr in Upper Egypt stumbled across a large jar buried in the soil of an ancient site. It proved to contain, not the treasure he had...

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Jim and Pedro

Geoffrey Best, 17 April 1980

The self-effacing authors of this excellent book aim to contribute some clear-headedness and penetration to what ought to be our great debate, but is too often our puzzle-headed mumble, about...

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Beyond Discussion

Neal Ascherson, 3 April 1980

‘Heh, heh!’ went the judge in the Thorpe trial, Mr Justice Cantley. According to Auberon Waugh, who sat in the press benches all through the six weeks of the Old Bailey proceedings,...

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Supreme Kidnap

James Fox, 20 March 1980

The readers of the Italian weekly L’Espresso (swaying in the breeze like a field of ripe corn) were treated, in their issue of 20 January, to a new form of journalistic entertainment...

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Great Good Places of the Mind

John Passmore, 6 March 1980

For a quarter of a century, Professor and Mrs Manuel have explored the highways and byways of Utopianism. Their task is now completed, their painstaking research encapsulated in a single...

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Knocking Through

Bernard Williams, 6 March 1980

The author of this book was once a builder, working particularly for the ‘knockers through’, as he calls them, who turn two rooms into one in terrace houses and make other well-known...

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Wittgenstein and the Simple Object

Norman Malcolm, 21 February 1980

Wittgenstein’s famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is written in a style that is austere and sometimes aphoristic. ‘The world is everything that is the case.’ ‘A picture...

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