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Opium of the Elite

Jonathan Rée: Hayek in England, 2 February 2023

Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950 
by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger.
Chicago, 840 pp., £35, November 2022, 978 0 226 81682 1
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... In 1950 Hayek took a job at the University of Chicago, where Milton Friedman and his wife, Rose, were turning the economics department into a beacon of free-market absolutism in the manner of Mises and even Rand. But Hayek took no part in it: he was employed in a different department (‘Social Thought’), with his salary paid by a private ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Evolution versus Metamorphosis, 1 September 2005

... what you might call a no-brainer. As Ian Hacking said in the last issue of the LRB, quoting Steven Rose quoting Theodosius Dobzhansky, ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ Since we use our brains to make up stories, and to make sense of the stories of others, it’s hard to disagree with the idea that the capacity for ...

Gentlemen Travellers

Denis Donoghue, 18 December 1986

Between the Woods and the Water 
by Patrick Leigh Fermor et al.
Murray, 248 pp., £13.95, October 1986, 0 7195 4264 2
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Coasting 
by Jonathan Raban.
Collins, 301 pp., £10.95, September 1986, 0 00 272119 8
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The Grand Tour 
by Hunter Davies.
Hamish Hamilton, 224 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 241 11907 3
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... cusped ogees led to spiralling steps; and indoors, springing from the leafy capitals of polygonal rose-coloured marble pillars, beautiful late gothic vaults closed over the Hall of the Knights. Has he really remembered those diapers, those cusped ogees – he doesn’t say he had a camera and a hundred rolls of film – or has he conjured the details on the ...

A Kind of Integrity

Jonathan Barnes, 6 November 1986

Philosophical Apprenticeships 
by Hans-Georg Gadamer, translated by Robert Sullivan.
MIT, 198 pp., £13.95, October 1985, 0 262 07092 8
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The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy 
by Hans-Georg Gadamer, translated by Christopher Smith.
Yale, 182 pp., £18, June 1986, 0 300 03463 6
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... the more so in that Heidegger would lecture at seven in the morning, while Hartmann never rose before midday and only flourished after midnight. Moreover, the circumstances of a young privatdozent were severe: a meagre salary had to be eked out by tuition money, and tuition money depended wholly on the skill of the tutor in attracting pupils. In any ...

The Young Man One Hopes For

Jonathan Rée: The Wittgensteins, 21 November 2019

Wittgenstein’s Family Letters: Corresponding with Ludwig 
edited by Brian McGuinness, translated by Peter Winslow.
Bloomsbury, 300 pp., £20, November 2018, 978 1 4742 9813 1
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... of pleasure? Is our awareness of pain more like listening, or hearing? When you imagine a red rose, how do you know it’s really red, and why might we think that blue is closer to green than red? ‘Say what you really think,’ he told his students, and ‘don’t try to be intelligent.’ The classes often ‘felt like the day of judgment’, as one ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: ‘Niche’, 3 March 2011

... of mainstream/middlebrow/middle-of-the-road culture still around, and doing dismayingly well: Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, for example, or Facebook, or The King’s Speech, or Coldplay. They could be the exceptions that prove the rule: without any hard data, and Harkin doesn’t provide any, it’s impossible to say for sure. So much for the ...

No Gentleman

Jonathan Parry, 23 June 1994

Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics 
by Peter Marsh.
Yale, 725 pp., £30, May 1994, 0 300 05801 2
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... in order to help keep trade routes open, were snubbed at home and abroad. Once again, the bile rose within Chamberlain. Sharing, in intensified form, the general post-war concern for Imperial security and economic competitiveness, and angered by the continuing complacency at the top of the Conservative Party, he launched ‘one last battle for a united ...

Thirty-Eight Thousand Bunches of Sweet Peas

Jonathan Parry: Lord Northcliffe’s Empire, 1 December 2022

The Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe 
by Andrew Roberts.
Simon & Schuster, 545 pp., £25, August 2022, 978 1 3985 0869 9
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... best estimate of the amount of gold held by the Bank of England on a given future day. Circulation rose enormously because of canny publicity, and because entrants had to find five witnesses for their guess. Harmsworth was the one who made real money from the competition: the winner died of TB eight years later. He branched out into new publications, notably ...

Diary

Joe Dunthorne: Real Me and Fake Me, 10 February 2022

... up and blocked me.I took reassurance from the fact that this sort of thing happens all the time. Jonathan Franzen is impersonated so often he has saved on his desktop a picture of himself holding a sign that says ‘I’m not on Twitter.’ He periodically emails this to the relevant authorities who, presumably, take prompt action. Which is all very well if ...

This Modern Mafia

Jonathan Steinberg, 7 October 1982

... machismo, its concept of honour and family. The leading mafiosi came from the bottom strata and rose by force, fraud and audacity. Don Momo began his career as a cowherd. Pino Arlacchi, in his Mafia, Peasants and Great Estates (to be published by Cambridge University Press in the spring of 1983), argues that the Mafia is best understood as a form of ...

Adrenaline Junkie

Jonathan Parry: John Tyndall’s Ascent, 21 March 2019

The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer and Public Intellectual 
by Roland Jackson.
Oxford, 556 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 0 19 878895 9
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... join him in Germany and study for a PhD, using his savings from railway surveying. In Marburg, he rose at 5 a.m., sitting in the cold in a dressing gown lined with cat fur, and worked on German, physics, chemistry and maths until ten at night. Having finished his dissertation on screw surfaces by early 1850, he discovered a more promising research area: the ...

Something of His Own

Jonathan Rée: Gotthold Lessing, 6 February 2014

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: His Life, Works and Thought 
by H.B. Nisbet.
Oxford, 734 pp., £85, September 2013, 978 0 19 967947 8
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... because his death had left his followers stupefied, staring ‘in amazement at the place where he rose up and disappeared’. A biography published in 1793 by Lessing’s brother Karl Gotthelf started a tradition of indiscriminate but baffled admiration that has continued ever since. Friedrich Schlegel claimed that Lessing had a historic significance far ...

Breathtaking Co-ordination

Jonathan Wright: Hitler’s Wartime Economy, 19 July 2007

The Third Reich in Power 
by Richard J. Evans.
Penguin, 941 pp., £12.99, May 2006, 0 14 100976 4
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The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy 
by Adam Tooze.
Penguin, 800 pp., £12.99, August 2007, 978 0 14 100348 1
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... Tooze shows that in the first year of the war the share of national output going to the military rose by 60 per cent. Hitler resisted pressure from his advisers to prepare for a long war because he believed – correctly – that Germany could not win a long war. Instead, he insisted on the massive expansion of programmes for aircraft production, ammunition ...

Diary

Jonathan Steele: In Transdniestria, 14 May 2009

... the slogans did not reflect that. The protests looked more like an amateur effort to replicate the Rose Revolution in Georgia or the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, although in both these countries there had been strong evidence of significant election fraud, which there wasn’t in Moldova. The April protests subsided as quickly as they began. It would be wrong ...

When Dad Came Out Here

Stephen Fender, 12 December 1996

Bad Land: An American Romance 
by Jonathan Raban.
Picador, 325 pp., £15.99, October 1996, 0 330 34621 0
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... I am not a travel writer,’ Jonathan Raban said in a recent interview. ‘For me, “travel writer” means someone who samples other people’s holidays – you talk about the food, the hotel, throw in a bit of local colour. If I thought that was the business I was in, I’d slit my throat.’ Bad Land, Raban’s new book about Montana, examines the present remains and historical origins of the last great wave of American western settlement, the migration of homesteaders to eastern Montana in the first decade of this century ...

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