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...
A few years ago, we discovered we were interested in the same problem, in very different periods of history. The problem is why sexuality has become so important to people as a definition of themselves.
The ‘homes fit for heroes’ of Mark Swenarton’s title – or some relation of them – can be found on the outskirts of almost any British town. Yet they are more seen...
Every student and every teacher knows the importance of the ‘seminal article’, which packs into a few pages more ideas than many books. In the field of European history, one such...
Professor Hexter made his mark in the learned world over forty years ago with an article in the American Historical Review called ‘The Problem of the Presbyterian Independents’. He...
These two books could not have been written about any other country. They are distinctively – indeed instinctively – British. Both are concerned with Britain’s most precious and...
Michel Foucault has of late become something of a cult figure in the Anglo-Saxon world. His critics can point out that he has the necessary qualifications for guru status, in that his writings...
The proof of a theory may lie in its application, but application means very different things in different corners of the universe of the mind. Expecting an eclipse of the sun at a certain time...
A part from the flaming scarlet with which the word ‘Incest’ is picked out on the covers of both these books, they do not have much in common, but the theme has a perennial...
There is a path in the rather dense forest of linguistics that respectable academics have been rather shy of treading in the past fifty years. This has not been so much because of the briars and...