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Endearingness

Donald Davie, 21 March 1991

The Oxford Book of Essays 
edited by John Gross.
Oxford, 680 pp., £17.95, February 1991, 0 19 214185 6
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... any interest it might have for strangers would be antiquarian: it was a relic from a time, not so long ago, when for the aspiring young the printed word, and that special kind of it called literature, was a medium not seriously challenged by any other. That time was surely gone, I thought, and printed literature now had a hard time claiming even parity with ...

Everything but the Glue

Richard Fortey: A Victorian sensation, 22 August 2002

Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ 
by James Secord.
Chicago, 624 pp., £22.50, February 2002, 0 226 74410 8
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... shelf life of Vestiges for 15 years until the Origin was published – and it continued to sell long afterwards. The compelling thing about the book’s anonymity was that different social groups could each invent their own author. In aristocratic circles authorship was attributed to one of their own – Sir Richard Vyvyan was a popular candidate at ...

Middle Positions

John Hedley Brooke, 21 July 1983

Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London 1850-1875 
by Adrian Desmond.
Blond and Briggs, 287 pp., £15.95, October 1982, 0 85634 121 5
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Evolution without Evidence: Charles Darwin and ‘The Origin Species’ 
by Barry Gale.
Harvester, 238 pp., £18.95, January 1983, 0 7108 0442 3
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The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography 
by Janet Browne.
Yale, 273 pp., £21, May 1983, 0 300 02460 6
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The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinsm 
by Brain Leith.
Collins, 174 pp., £7.95, December 1982, 0 00 219548 8
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... anti-clericalism, would not go the whole way with the German monist Ernst Haeckel in denying a long-term purpose built into an original creation. Such qualifications will be familiar to students of Early Victorian science. But until now one dichotomy has remained more or less intact: the contrast between a positivist philosophy of science shared by the ...

Hooked

Margaret Visser: Mega-Fish, 16 April 1998

Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World 
by Mark Kurlansky.
Cape, 294 pp., £12.99, March 1998, 0 224 05104 0
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... middling size – a number that will baffle all the efforts of man to exterminate.’ People have long enjoyed marvelling at the sheer amount, the endlessness of cod. The vast cod-grazing grounds off the American Atlantic coast may well have drawn the very first Europeans to the continent: Mark Kurlansky provides evidence that not only Viking explorers but ...

Prophet of the Rocks

Richard Fortey: William Smith, 9 August 2001

The Map that Changed the World: The Tale of William Smith and the Birth of a Science 
by Simon Winchester.
Viking, 338 pp., £12.99, August 2001, 0 670 88407 3
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... of organic evolution. It is clear from his notes that he understood the succession required long periods of time, but he seems not to have troubled greatly with theoretical speculation. If his clergymen friends saw evidence of the Flood, so be it. Nonetheless, his steadfast and pragmatic assemblage of facts was to be one of the sources of evidence to ...

Last Word

Michael Ignatieff, 3 February 1983

The Wolf-Man: Sixty Years Later 
by Karin Obholzer, translated by Michael Shaw.
Routledge, 250 pp., £12.50, November 1982, 0 7100 9354 3
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Ernest Jones: Freud’s Alter Ego 
by Vincent Brome.
Caliban, 250 pp., £12.50, January 1983, 0 904573 57 5
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... woman’ did take place. He had managed it himself. He had wrestled free of the infantile trauma. Long before his meeting with Freud. The Master helped him with his permission, but that was all that mattered. Who are we to believe here? The poignant fact is that the ‘breakthrough to the woman’ was not enough. No sooner had he married Therese, than his ...

Shell Shock

Margaret Visser, 22 February 1996

The English, the French and the Oyster 
by Robert Neild.
Quiller, 212 pp., £18.50, October 1995, 1 899163 12 3
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... The English, the French and the Oyster, the extent to which the oyster had been lost to England long before I imbibed the idea of one as part of British myth. Oysters were common in Britain until the mid-19th century. ‘What I mean, sir,’ says Sam in The Pickwick Papers, ‘is, that the poorer the place is, the greater call there seems to be for ...

Brotherly Love

Susan Pedersen: Down and Out in Victorian London, 31 March 2005

Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London 
by Seth Koven.
Princeton, 399 pp., £19.95, September 2004, 0 691 11592 3
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... sexual deviance, but his Victorian readers had no trouble grasping his meaning. His was one in a long series of publications that insinuated a link between vagrancy and homosexuality (so effectively that public-order legislation came to conflate the two), while his essay was appropriated and reworked by middle-class men with sexual anxieties of their ...

Keep quiet about it

Alan Ryan: Henry Sidgwick’s Anxieties, 2 June 2005

Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe 
by Bart Schultz.
Cambridge, 858 pp., £40, June 2004, 0 521 82967 4
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... Sidgwick wrote slowly in both of two different senses. The process of composition was invariably long and painful; and what he composed was a form of expository prose that took a very long time to unveil its meaning, and which was characterised by endless hesitations and second thoughts, doubts and qualifications ...

Animal, Spiritual and Cerebral

Mary Midgley, 18 August 1983

Animal Thought 
by Stephen Walker.
Routledge, 388 pp., £17.50, January 1983, 0 7100 9037 4
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On the Evolution of Human Behaviour 
by Peter Reynolds.
California, 259 pp., £20, December 1981, 0 520 04294 8
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The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit 
by Melvin Konner.
Heinemann, 436 pp., £16.50, October 1982, 0 434 39703 2
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Sociobiology and the Human Dimension 
by Georg Breuer.
Cambridge, 264 pp., £22.50, January 1983, 0 521 24544 3
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Sociobiology and the Pre-Emption of Social Science 
by Alexander Rosenberg.
Blackwell, 210 pp., £9.90, March 1981, 0 631 12625 2
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... study which protected the human race from serious comparison with any other species. For quite a long time this enterprise succeeded. What has doomed it now is the flood of light thrown on the whole subject by the interesting, fertile and canon-free comparisons which have in the meantime been made, both in neurology and in the study of animal behaviour ...

Fallen Language

Donald Davie, 21 June 1984

The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Deutsch, 203 pp., £12.95, May 1984, 0 233 97581 0
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... be derided – as a callowness in ourselves which the language that we use, British English, has long ago grown out of. We have shown ourselves to be less grown-up than the language that we attempt to bend to our immature purposes – an attempt that the language itself frustrates by appealing, implicitly and inevitably, to English-language-users more ...

What lives and what dies?

Francis Gooding: The End-Cretaceous Event, 3 January 2019

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: The Untold Story of a Lost World 
by Steve Brusatte.
Macmillan, 404 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 5098 3006 0
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... was cold, dark and bathed in acid rain. This ‘nuclear winter’ was sufficiently severe and long-lasting to halt photosynthesis on land and in the oceans, causing the collapse of those ecosystems that had survived the initial cataclysm. Some 70 per cent of living species were eliminated. Foremost among those that perished were the ...

An Ugly Baby

Andrew Berry: Alfred Russel Wallace, 18 May 2000

Footsteps in the Forest: Alfred Russel Wallace in the Amazon 
by Sandra Knapp.
Natural History Museum, 96 pp., £16.95, November 1999, 0 565 09143 3
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... worth of precious specimens, including the live birds and monkeys he had carefully tended for so long. As the lifeboats hovered close to the wreck in the forlorn hope that the fire would attract rescuers, Wallace watched events turn even more poignant – several of the animals, he said, ‘had retreated to the bowsprit out of reach of the flames, appearing ...

A Life without a Jolt

Ferdinand Mount: M.R. James, 26 January 2012

Collected Ghost Stories 
by M.R. James.
Oxford, 468 pp., £14.99, October 2011, 978 0 19 956884 0
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... detective story, the ghost story should not be too up-to-date. ‘Thirty years ago’ or ‘Not long before the war’ were proper openings. Close enough in time, therefore, for the reader to think: ‘If I’m not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me.’ The ghost ought to be a contemporary of the person who sees it, just as Hamlet’s ...

Damp-Lipped Hilary

Jenny Diski: Larkin’s juvenilia, 23 May 2002

Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions 
by Philip Larkin, edited by James Booth.
Faber, 498 pp., £20, May 2002, 0 571 20347 7
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... thrashing her unmercifully, her face a mask of ferocity, caring little where the blows fell as long as they found a mark somewhere on Marie’s squirming body’). There is a mixture of the above two incidents when Hilary beats up and then nuzzles Margaret, an in this case guilty junior: (‘Lust had turned into anger, and anger into cruelty, and now ...

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