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Lunacies

Ian Campbell Ross: ‘provincial genius’, 23 October 2003

Hermsprong; or Man as He Is Not 
by Robert Bage, edited by Pamela Perkins.
Broadview, 387 pp., £8.99, March 2002, 1 55111 279 5
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... he married at the age of 23. Initially he worked it alone, then with his close friend William Hutton, the future historian of Birmingham. In 1765, Bage expanded his activities, investing in ironworks as part of a consortium that included Erasmus Darwin. When the ironworks failed in 1779, at a personal loss of £1500, ‘the result filled him with ...

At the British Museum

Peter Campbell: London 1753, 25 September 2003

... month’s papers showed the lucky few holding up numbered tickets to the public gallery at the Hutton Inquiry. Two hundred and fifty years ago it was numbered tickets to Westminster Hall that were in demand: two Jacobite earls and a lord were on trial there. Graphics are not what they were – no swirl of copperplate breaking into black lettering for ...

Look here, Mr Goodwood

John Bayley, 19 September 1996

Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Puzzles in 19th-Century Fiction 
by John Sutherland.
Oxford, 262 pp., £3.99, June 1996, 9780192825162
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... was recognised, and absurdly misunderstood, by the well-known and influential critic R.H. Hutton in his review in the Spectator of November 1881. He praised the novel highly, but abominated what he regarded as James’s open hint that his ‘ideal lady’ saw, at the end, ‘a straight path’ to a liaison with her rejected lover. Henrietta Stackpole ...

Choke Point

Patrick Cockburn: In Dover, 7 November 2019

... it reaches the sea that the valley opens out, with the giant docks to the left and right. Philip Hutton, an architectural historian, thinks Dover’s layout makes it look like ‘a hammerhead shark’: that long tapering stretch inland, and then the massively spread-out head of the port areas facing the sea. It’s a town that invites this sort of ...

Diary

Leah Price: The Death of Stenography, 4 December 2008

... but it couldn’t take the place of a classical education: when his fellow journalist R.H. Hutton asserted that ‘in some important intellectual, if not mechanical respects, Mr Dickens did not cease to be a reporter even after he became an author,’ the social connotations of ‘mechanic’ must have grated. Like Dickens, David Copperfield owes his ...

Our Guy

John Barnie: Blair’s Style, 20 January 2011

... is ‘a nice guy’, and so is Guy Verhofstadt; Andrew Adonis is ‘a thoroughly nice guy’. John Hutton is also ‘a thoroughly nice guy’, while the footmen at Balmoral are ‘very nice guys’. The president of Bulgaria is ‘a lovely guy’ and Jean Chrétien ‘a good guy’. Douglas Alexander is ‘a very clever guy’ and José María Aznar ‘a tough ...

Diary

Melanie McFadyean: In the Wrong Crowd, 25 September 2014

... the concept of a joint venture … they do not detract from its general practical worth.’ Lord Hutton agreed that ‘the rules of common law are not based solely on logic but relate to practical concerns and, in relation to crimes committed in the course of joint enterprise, to the need to give effective protection to the public against criminals operating ...

Hateful Sunsets

David Craig: Highlands and Headlands, 5 March 2015

Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place 
by Philip Marsden.
Granta, 348 pp., £20, October 2014, 978 1 84708 628 0
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... otherwise, as seems to have been the habit among inquirers for centuries. In Pagan Britain Ronald Hutton shows that the beliefs supposed to underlie ancient practices have often been imposed with little evidence.* Roman writers went in for ‘atrocity propaganda’ to portray the Britons they had conquered as savage barbarians. In Dorset some elderly women ...

Hammers for Pipes

Richard Fortey: The Beginnings of Geology, 9 February 2006

Bursting the Limits of Time 
by Martin Rudwick.
Chicago, 840 pp., £31.50, December 2005, 0 226 73111 1
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... would go something like this. Towards the end of the 18th century, the Scottish genius James Hutton recognised that the Earth was of enormous antiquity, or, as he put it, showed ‘no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’; furthermore, he correctly inferred the igneous origin of many rocks, unlike the Wernerians, who thought that these Primary ...

Diary

Glen Newey: Life with WikiLeaks, 6 January 2011

... out, even when the data are released with official blessing. Evidence given in open court to the Hutton Inquiry by Sir Kevin Tebbitt exposed as lies Tony Blair’s claims about his own role in the David Kelly affair; Blair staggered on in office for another four years. Bill Clinton survived the unmasking of his perjurious deposition in the Paula Jones case ...

On SIAC

Brian Barder: The Special Immigration Appeals Commission, 18 March 2004

... area of which few serving judges have much, if any, direct knowledge. (The recently retired Lord Hutton may be an exception, though his past experience of the intelligence world seems to have had a questionable effect on his findings.) My experience suggests that the lay member’s views on legal questions, though diffidently expressed, can also sometimes be ...

Drugs, anyone?

Seamus Perry: George Meredith, 18 June 2015

Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads 
by George Meredith, edited by Criscillia Benford and Rebecca Mitchell.
Yale, 390 pp., £40, April 2015, 978 0 300 17317 8
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... the wholesome poems about rustics, but they mostly loathed ‘Modern Love’. Even the great R.H. Hutton of the Spectator thought ‘Modern Lust’ might have been a fitter title and disliked what he called its ‘fast’ manners. Swinburne wrote in with an angry defence which Hutton printed but was unpersuaded by. It came ...

An Elite Worth Joining

David Trotter: Preston Sturges, 13 April 2023

Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges 
by Stuart Klawans.
Columbia, 366 pp., £22, January, 978 0 231 20729 4
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... storage facility for state secrets. But he did rather like the atmosphere of the place. Eleanor Hutton, his second wife, was the daughter of the food magnate Marjorie Merriweather Post, who built this ‘seventy-bedroom cottage on the sea’, as he called it, in the late 1920s. The weeks Sturges spent as Eleanor’s house guest at Mar-a-Lago supplied him ...

Gen Z and Me

Joe Moran, 16 February 2023

... of this year’s new undergraduates were born between September 2003 and August 2004, the year the Hutton Inquiry reported and Channel 4 aired the last episode of Friends. They were two or three when Jobs launched the iPhone. In Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age (Chicago, £18), an anthropologist (Roberta Katz), a linguist (Sarah Ogilvie), a ...

Desmondism

John Sutherland, 23 March 1995

Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple 
by Adrian Desmond.
Joseph, 474 pp., £20, November 1994, 0 7181 3641 1
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... the 1980s) is wilfully disconcerting – and tasteless. It seems true (on the testimony of R. H. Hutton, writing a decade or so later) that Huxley invented the instantly ubiquitous term ‘agnostic’ (an ungrammatical compound, as the OED sniffily notes). But that he was the direct inspiration for Sartre’s L’Etre et le néant is highly ...

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