Worldwide, drinking is seen as macho; it is usually part of a ritual; and its main purpose is to make sad people happy. In that sense it is an international equaliser.
‘It’s a strange thing,’ said Harold Macmillan after becoming Prime Minister, ‘that I have now got the biggest job I ever had, and less help in doing it than I have ever...
‘In so short a time you have achieved the kind of fame people work towards for a lifetime,’ Diana Lamplugh wrote to her eldest daughter in August 1986. This daughter had achieved fame...
The main text of this book takes up only 215 pages. It tends to be repetitive and includes a number of not very well designed diagrams and maps. To that is added a list of about 630 references...
At a friend’s house, I saw a video of Liebelei, Max Ophuls’s beautiful film of Arthur Schnitzler’s play which was shown on television some months ago. Made in 1932, this...
Michael Young is a rarity among sociologists: he has a feel for the people he writes about, and he writes well. When he takes us into a Merseyside factory and walks us around in the company of...
If human history does, indeed, have a structure, it is, as Professor Gellner emphasises, discernible only with hindsight. The path which has led, in his words, ‘from the cosy social cocoon...
The thing that really got to me after a while was the prostitutes. As I drove back from Cape Town city centre to suburban Mowbray at night along the old Main Road, I would see dozens of them...
For nearly two centuries now, the treatment of the mad in Georgian England has been almost uniformly portrayed in the darkest hues. Nineteenth-century lunacy reformers pictured the preceding age...
Madness is fascinating to read about in literature, where it seems to provide a royal road through tragic downfall to moral salvation. But this is, of course, the world of art, where everything works out...
‘Perhaps the mind stands to the brain in much the same way that the program stands to the computer.’ That is the vision behind this admirable book for newcomers. Introductions to...
No one interested in the spread of ideas can have failed to notice the influence that the computer is exerting not only on our habits of life but also on our ways of thought. Twenty years ago the...
Allan Hobson is a leading Harvard neuroscientist who has figured prominently in the breakthroughs which have occurred over the past three decades in the neurophysiology and neuropsychology of...
Professor Peter Gay is an eminent American cultural historian of German origin, an enthusiastic convert to Freudian doctrine, and an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytical Association...
Almost fifty years ago the French ethnologist Gontran de Poncins published his international best-seller Kabloona, an account of his year-long stay with the Netsilikmuit, the Seal Eskimos of...
Anne Harrington’s masterly account of homo duplex is more than just an account of the emergence of our understanding of our own inner dissymmetry. It sets the striving towards comprehension...
This book begins like a novel: ‘A woman attends a funeral. The coffin is lowered into the grave. A man approaches her and says: “He was not your father.” ’ But the...
‘Among the Bechuanas it is a rule ... The Borero Indians of Brazil think ... The Huichol Indians admire ... In some parts of Melanesia ...’ And in Bangkok at 12 o’clock? It...