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Oh, the curse!

David Runciman: A home run, 19 February 2004

Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball 
by Stephen Jay Gould.
Cape, 342 pp., £16.99, January 2004, 0 224 05042 7
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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game 
by Michael Lewis.
Norton, 288 pp., $24.95, June 2003, 0 393 05765 8
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... that the Red Sox lost game seven as well. Bill Buckner moved to Idaho. Oh, the curse! Yet, as Stephen Jay Gould points out in an essay in this posthumous collection of his baseball writings, it was not Buckner’s fault that the Red Sox lost the Series. When Buckner made his mistake, Boston had already blown their lead (on a wild pitch, though almost no ...

Devil take the hindmost

John Sutherland, 14 December 1995

Shadows of the Future: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy 
by Patrick Parrinder.
Liverpool, 170 pp., £25, July 1995, 0 85323 439 6
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The History of Mr Wells 
by Michael Foot.
Doubleday, 318 pp., £20, October 1995, 0 385 40366 6
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A Modern Utopia 
by H.G. Wells, edited by Krishan Kumar.
Everyman, 271 pp., £5.99, November 1994, 0 460 87498 5
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... are indistinguishable from the current hypotheses of theoretical physicists like Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking. Parrinder’s chapters take the form of free-wheeling meditations on Wellsian topoi – ‘Possibilities of Space and Time’, ‘The Fall of Empires’, ‘Utopia and Meta-Utopia’. In Part Two of Shadows of the Future, he branches out into ...

That Wilting Flower

Hilary Mantel: The Lure of the Unexplained, 24 January 2008

Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained 
edited by Una McGovern.
Chambers, 760 pp., £35, October 2007, 978 0 550 10215 7
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... chemistry you missed. It’s the people cringing from their scientific illiteracy who buy Stephen Hawking books they can’t read, as if having them on the shelf will make the knowledge rub off; they snap up tracts on atheism, too, to show that if they’re ignorant they’re at least rational. But still, our understanding of the mechanisms of the ...

A Common Playhouse

Charles Nicholl: The Globe Theatre, 8 January 2015

Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle That Gave Birth to the Globe 
by Chris Laoutaris.
Fig Tree, 528 pp., £20, April 2015, 978 1 905490 96 7
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... fellow sideman Robert Baheire, the churchwardens Thomas Holmes and Edward Ley, and the minister Stephen Egerton. Laoutaris has also established the exact location of Field’s printing shop, in a property called (after its former monastic use) the Timber House. This lay off the western end of Carter Lane, abutting onto the back of Elizabeth Russell’s ...

Brideshead and the Tower Blocks

Patrick Wright, 2 June 1988

Home: A Short History of an Idea 
by Witold Rybczynski.
Heinemann, 256 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 434 14292 1
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... watercolours, this bathroom is contrasted favourably with ‘the uniform, clinical, little chambers, glittering with chromium-plate and looking-glass, which pass for luxury in the modern world.’ This brings us closer to the effective point of origin. Published a couple of months before Attlee’s election victory in July 1945, Brideshead Revisited ...

Negative Equivalent

Iain Sinclair: In the Super Sewer, 19 January 2023

... at Acton,’ the official storyteller for the Super Sewer told me, ‘it would roll all the way to Chambers Wharf, the shaft beyond Tower Bridge.’ This gigantic pipe, a 7.2-metre-wide triumph of civil engineering, as spookily lit and smooth-skinned as the underground redoubt of the latest world-dominating Bond villain, inclines gently downwards to the ...

Which play was performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?

Blair Worden: A Play for Plotters, 10 July 2003

... says so. The first person to assemble (almost all) the evidence – invaluably – was E.K. Chambers in 1930. He cannot be said to have analysed it. There could, he was content to observe, be ‘little doubt’ that the play was Shakespeare’s Richard II; from which oracular ruling a hardening tradition has developed. A number of recent ...

Quantum Influencers

Adam Mars-Jones, 7 April 2022

When We Cease to Understand the World 
by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West.
Pushkin, 192 pp., £8.99, May 2021, 978 1 78227 614 2
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... he died in Basle in 1934,not knowing that, years later, the Nazis would use in their gas chambers the pesticide he had helped to create to murder his half-sister, his brother-in-law, his nephews and countless other Jews who died hunkered down, muscles cramping, skin covered with red and green spots, bleeding from their ears, spitting foam from their ...

Diary

Adam Mars-Jones: Not the Marrying Kind, 20 March 2014

... routines. An actual day in court would be interrupted by lunch, possibly by a conference in chambers. This more free-wheeling inquisition was interrupted by me making Dad coffee or an omelette, maybe pork chops with gravy and carrots. To an extent he treated me as a hostile witness whose testimony he was determined to discredit, which didn’t ...

A Degenerate Assemblage

Anthony Grafton: Bibliomania, 13 April 2023

Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America 
by Denise Gigante.
Yale, 378 pp., £25, January 2023, 978 0 300 24848 7
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... borrow or read. Anyone over eighteen could explore the marble labyrinths of what is now called the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building: a palace of the people on 42nd Street, traditionally known as the Main or Central Branch, with its encyclopedic holdings. In the reading room, battered but still grand, readers waited for their number to appear on the indicator ...

In the Workshop

Tom Paulin: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 22 January 1998

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 672 pp., £23.50, December 1997, 0 674 63712 7
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Shakespeare's Sonnets 
edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones.
Arden, 503 pp., £7.99, September 1997, 1 903436 57 5
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... speech acts’, we remain condemned to a ‘static view of any given sonnet’. Gently criticising Stephen Booth’s account of the contrary pulls in sonnet 146, she that grants that his discussion is ‘interesting’, but finds it too preoccupied ‘with meaning alone’. The editorial and critical accounts published over the last thirty years do not pay ...

Midwinter

J.B. Trapp, 17 November 1983

Thomas More: History and Providence 
by Alistair Fox.
Blackwell, 271 pp., £19.50, September 1982, 0 631 13094 2
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The Statesman and the Fanatic: Thomas Wolsey and Thomas More 
by Jasper Ridley.
Constable, 338 pp., £12.50, October 1982, 9780094634701
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English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition 
by John King.
Princeton, 539 pp., £30.70, December 1982, 0 691 06502 0
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Seven-Headed Luther: Essays in Commemoration of a Quincentenary, 1483-1983 
edited by Peter Newman Brooks.
Oxford, 325 pp., £22.50, July 1983, 0 19 826648 0
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The Complete Works of St Thomas More. Vol. VI: A Dialogue concerning Heresies. Part 1: The Text, Part 2: Introduction, Commentary, Appendices, Glossary, Index 
edited by T.M.C. Lawler, Germain Marc’hadour and Richard Marius.
Yale, 435 pp., £76, November 1981, 0 300 02211 5
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... ideas and their history – has been less popular with English historians and critics. R.W. Chambers, for instance, author of what is still the best general book on More, gets over the religious-controversial works in a few pages. If modern scholars can thus avoid the matter, More could not. He was soon scurrying along behind his king to tidy up the ...

The Colossus of Maroussi

Iain Sinclair: In Athens, 27 May 2010

... pitch. The building is not separated from the city, it’s not a respite, a dream with too many chambers, collisions, compartments; it tells one story, the rock. The temple and its vanished gods. On each level, a floor-to-ceiling window sets the modelled Parthenon against the structure on the hill, with the colour of the Doric columns shifting through the ...

The Darwin Show

Steven Shapin, 7 January 2010

... featuring the ‘African-American Atheist Rapper Greydon Square’, the ‘self-styled “Walking Stephen Hawking”’. In Manhattan, the Ensemble Theater produced Darwin’s Challenge (‘On his trip aboard the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin wanders into a cave on Galapagos and finds himself on the set of a 21st-century reality TV show … He gets kicked off in ...

There isn’t any inside!

Adam Mars-Jones: William Gaddis, 23 September 2021

The Recognitions 
by William Gaddis.
NYRB, 992 pp., £24, November 2020, 978 1 68137 466 6
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JR 
by William Gaddis.
NYRB, 784 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 68137 468 0
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... that Gaddis rejects – far from it – but relevance in narrative.The novel is choked with side-chambers, not connecting either with one another or with the main business of what is a very unbusinesslike novel. If Otto is barely relevant then his father can’t be more than a footnote to a footnote. Yet Gaddis devotes page after page to Mr Pivner, pages ...

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