A few years ago, when I was reviewing a book on Women in Social Work, I made a vow to myself that I would never again engage in discussion of ‘Women in’ any sphere. It seemed to me...
President Reagan’s attention span is known to be brief, and he is said to prefer his memoranda to be limited to a single page. It is therefore unlikely that he will read closely the...
Riots have the appearance of disorganised and confusing events, lacking clear definition and structure. They seem to be a kind of sudden rupture which is only uncertainly related to its immediate...
The first few pages of this book declare a general attitude, wholly admirable in combining the firmest commitment to rationality with intellectual humility, that contrasts not only with the...
If you teach or study literature in a university, the chances are you’ve spent at least some of your time recently arguing with colleagues about the uses and abuses of literary theory. Not...
Raymond’s Revuebar is usually thought of as Soho’s superior strip club. It stages not mere skin shows but Festivals of Erotica, it sells Dunhill or Lambert and Butler cigarettes, and...
The wedding is over. Everything went very well. The image on the television screen looked just as we would have it look. In a year when the wedding guest’s vague fear that something might...
Last year a book was published in Paris with the following sentences written on the back cover: Is motherly love an instinct which proceeds from ‘the feminine character.’ [une nature...
Dr Davis’s book is a long, careful and detailed study of utopian writing in England from Sir Thomas More to the end of the 17th century. He has interesting things to say about well-known...
It is possible that I am asked to comment on this expensive and largely unreadable volume only because its editor has achieved national celebrity by seeming to figure as a sacrificial victim in...
There is nothing very mysterious about the interest we take in self-destructive personalities. To be callous about it – and we are all callous when it comes to disasters relived on the...
It is said that when the electors to a vacant chair of psychology met recently in a small but by no means undistinguished university, a university with some past distinction in psychology itself,...
Jeanne Favret-Saada’s book, Deadly Words, subtitled ‘Witchcraft in the Bocage’, deals with a subject of abiding fascination. While there are always people who readily admit to...
In the last twenty years social anthropologists, dissatisfied with the formulations of their seniors, have experimented with a number of approaches, some of which, such as structuralism, have...
Time was secularised in the later Middle Ages. Merchants and craftsmen came to think of time as belonging to themselves. As one city after another installed a public clock, task-oriented time was replaced...
The Forbidden Experiment is about cases of children reared in isolation from other human beings and, in particular, about the celebrated ‘Wild Boy of Aveyron’, who emerged from the...
Nobody could be more aware than Professor Passmore of the hazards of writing on the philosophy of teaching. He notes disarmingly that ‘the chance of writing even a reasonably good book on...
It has only been recently that anthropologists have realised that their best friends are volcanoes. The ash falling from a series of eruptions can produce sequences of fossils nearly as good as...