Our Sort and Their Sort

Ralf Dahrendorf, 20 December 1979

Every country has its social obsession, and class is undoubtedly the British, or at any rate English, obsession. It is, to be sure, more amusing than some others. When Franz Josef Strauss...

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Ego’s End

John Sturrock, 22 November 1979

Sherry Turkle has written a reasonable, useful and heroically neutral book on the Lacan phenomenon: the sudden celebrity in France as maître à penser of Jacques Lacan, an elderly...

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Human Nature

Stuart Hampshire, 25 October 1979

Biology​ as a guide to ethics has been an intellectual fad of the last decade, and Mrs Midgley is trying to restore a sense of proportion. Sociobiology has had its home principally in the...

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Foremost Economist

Rosalind Mitchison, 25 October 1979

Three names​ dominate the debates on the social policy of 19th-century Britain: Bentham, Malthus and Chalmers. The first two were original thinkers whose ideas often contradict the system...

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Dictionaries

Randolph Quirk, 25 October 1979

English lexicography​ knocks Johnnie Walker into a tricuspidal fedora. Over four hundred years, and going stronger than ever. Of course, in the 16th century the market was for...

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