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Philosophical Vinegar, Marvellous Salt

Malcolm Gaskill: Alchemical Pursuits, 15 July 2021

The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700 
by Jennifer M. Rampling.
Chicago, 408 pp., £28, December 2020, 978 0 226 71070 9
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... lion’, mercury ‘white fume’. The philosopher’s stone was a laboriously produced reddish brown powder, used to promote base metals into precious ones. Even if metals weren’t involved, the aim was still to release power stored in nature so as to produce observable effects. The four elements possessed qualities that could be enhanced or suppressed to ...

Leader of the Martians

Thomas Nagel: J.L. Austin’s War, 7 September 2023

J.L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer 
by M.W. Rowe.
Oxford, 660 pp., £30, May 2023, 978 0 19 870758 5
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... current work in circulation were two typescripts of dictated material, The Blue Book and The Brown Book, which were copied and passed around among the initiated. In spite of Austin’s later denials of the influence of Wittgenstein and the Cambridge School, Rowe makes a plausible case, based on internal evidence, that Austin had read The Blue Book before ...

Doomed to Sincerity

Germaine Greer: Rochester as New Man, 16 September 1999

The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester 
edited by Harold Love.
Oxford, 712 pp., £95, April 1999, 0 19 818367 4
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... appear works that are certainly not by Rochester, because they are known to be by other people, by Elizabeth Rochester, Sir George Etherege, Sir Carr Scroope and John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave. Well-known poems turn up under the rubric ‘Writings for the theatre’ even when no evidence of a theatrical intent can be adduced; thus the fragment in ...

The Health Transformation Army

James Meek: What can the WHO do?, 2 July 2020

... responsible. The Suez Canal, according to a recent history of the WHO by Marcos Cueto, Theodore Brown and Elizabeth Fee, made Europeans feel ‘dangerously close to India’.† In 1900 the fear was the imminent completion of a railway line linking Berlin to Mecca, seen as a cholera hotbed.Cholera, which returned to ...

Terror on the Vineyard

Terry Castle: Boss Ladies, Watch Out!, 15 April 1999

A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman 
by Rosemary Mahoney.
Doubleday, 273 pp., $23.95, November 1998, 9780385479318
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... own polite loathing of her grand yet self-absorbed mother. In the mordantly sapphic novels of Elizabeth Bowen, older women are depicted as seductive and treacherous – enchanting sociopaths who leave the younger women who fall in love with them both shell-shocked and vengeful. (See in particular Bowen’s brilliant first novel, The Hotel, of 1927.) In ...

Extremes

Seamus Deane, 7 February 1985

Children of the Dead End: The Rat-Pit 
by Patrick MacGill.
Caliban, 305 pp., £10, September 1983, 0 904573 36 2
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The Red Horizon The Great Push: An Episode of the Great War 
by Patrick MacGill.
Caliban, 306 pp., £9, October 1984, 0 904573 90 7
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The Navy Poet: The Collected Poetry of Patrick MacGill 
Caliban, 407 pp., £12, October 1984, 0 904573 99 0Show More
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... people at home and abroad. Yet neither is considered to be a novelist in the sense that, say, Elizabeth Bowen is. Her novel of 1929, The Last September, is also a lament for a vanishing class, that of the highly privileged Anglo-Irish ascendancy. In describing the three novels of those two years in this way – as chronicles of disaster – we blur one of ...

Perfect Companions

C.K. Stead, 8 June 1995

Christina Stead: A Biography 
by Hazel Rowley.
Secker, 646 pp., £12.99, January 1995, 0 436 20298 0
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... day he called her in. ‘He looked at me,’ Stead wrote many years later. ‘He had beautiful brown eyes ... and he looked at me with absolute astonishment.’ The story of Christina Stead’s life is also the story of Bill Blake’s. They lived together unmarried for 23 years until his first wife gave him a divorce, and remained together until he died in ...

Stupid Questions

Laleh Khalili: Battlefield to Boardroom, 24 February 2022

Risk: A User’s Guide 
by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico.
Penguin, 343 pp., £20, October 2021, 978 0 241 48192 9
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... selling them armoured vehicles at an inflated price. McChrystal was also invited by General Doug Brown, as the head of Special Operations Command his boss between 2003 and 2007, to join the board of a Virginia-based company called Knowledge International. KI’s uninformative website doesn’t mention that it’s the US arm of a UAE-based firm set up by a ...

Writing Machines

Tom McCarthy: On Realism and the Real, 18 December 2014

... toreador is), plots a ‘perfect’ car crash in which his own vehicle will collide with Elizabeth Taylor’s (not a stand-in this time, but the actual actress – that is, the genuine stand-in) at the precise moment of his orgasm: a supremely wrought marriage of techne, spectacle, sex, death and all the rest. He finds out when her car will pass such ...

Shaving-Pot in Waiting

Rosemary Hill: Victoria’s Albert, 23 February 2012

Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death That Changed the Monarchy 
by Helen Rappaport.
Hutchinson, 336 pp., £20, November 2011, 978 0 09 193154 4
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Albert 
by Jules Stewart.
I.B. Tauris, 276 pp., £19.99, October 2011, 978 1 84885 977 7
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... was much debate about whether or not it was a Good Thing. For Protestants, England’s saviour was Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen who had reigned alone and made her reluctance to marry an instrument of foreign policy. Hence, on top of everything else, the devoutly Lutheran Albert had to contend with persistent rumours that he was a Roman Catholic. He was still ...

Gentlemen Did Not Dig

Rosemary Hill: 18th-Century Gap Years, 24 June 2010

The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment 
by Jason Kelly.
Yale, 366 pp., £40, January 2010, 978 0 300 15219 7
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... and Oxford and Cambridge colleges, as well as the homes of Garrick, Sterne, Lancelot (Capability) Brown and Burke, who all subscribed to The Antiquities of Athens. Succeeding volumes took decades to appear and Stuart saw only the first of them through the press. Gradually, however, their effect was felt and the society presided, as J. Mordaunt Crook put ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Thatcher in Gravesend, 9 May 2013

... churning up dust. In vast, windowless sheds specialising in Logistics. In geometric stacks of red, brown and blue containers: HAMBURG SÜD, HANJIN, MOL. Like a monumental Paul Klee hammered out in steel. In Thatcher’s day it seemed a ground-level manifestation of what I took to be her vision of enterprise: deranged scams, small businesses wiped out. And the ...

The Imagined Market

Donald MacKenzie: Money Games, 31 October 2002

Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science 
by Philip Mirowski.
Cambridge, 670 pp., £24.95, February 2002, 0 521 77526 4
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... utterances – ‘you are now husband and wife’; ‘I name this ship Queen Elizabeth’ – make themselves true by being uttered.) In part, Callon has in mind loosely ‘economic’ practices such as marketing and accountancy, and the Enron scandal has certainly focused attention on how key data such as firms’ earnings are ...

I’ll be back

Marjorie Garber: Sequels, 19 August 1999

Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel 
edited by Paul Budra and Betty Schellenberg.
Toronto, 217 pp., £40, February 1999, 0 8020 0915 8
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... from Margaret Dashwood, or Interference (a sequel to Sense and Sensibility by Edith Charlotte Brown, 1929) to Consequence, or Whatever Became of Charlotte Lucas (Elizabeth Newark, 1997) and Desire & Duty: A Sequel to Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (Ted Bader and Marilyn Bader, 1997) have appeared in ...

Light on a rich country

Rosalind Mitchison, 17 June 1982

The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction 
by E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield.
Edward Arnold, 779 pp., £45, October 1981, 0 7131 6264 3
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... There are fewer than a hundred parishes to give a base for the period before the accession of Elizabeth I. It may also have been a mistake to have selected parishes by size, for the pattern of child and infant deaths seems to have differed according to the size of the parish. But the Cambridge Group were working with over three million figures, and it ...

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