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Who’s your dance partner?

Thomas Meaney: Europe inside Africa, 7 November 2019

The Scramble for Europe: Young Africa on Its Way to the Old Continent 
by Stephen Smith.
Polity, 197 pp., £15.99, April 2019, 978 1 5095 3457 9
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... from Egypt to Europe this year.’ For Brussels, Sisi’s waxing authoritarianism appears a small price to pay for his perfect record in policing migration in a country with rampant unemployment, especially among the young. As the Dutch president, Mark Rutte, put it in Cairo, ‘sometimes you have to dance with whoever’s on the dance floor.’ Some ...

Who was David Peterley?

Michael Holroyd, 15 November 1984

... arresting picture of a writer in Peterley Harvest is that of A.E. Housman delivering his Leslie Stephen Lecture, ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’. Every fact that Pennington uses, from the date and the time to the presence of Quiller-Couch and Will Spens, the Vice-Chancellor, may once more be checked from works subsequently published, such as The Letters ...

Through the Trapdoor

Jeremy Harding: Walter Benjamin’s Last Day, 19 July 2007

The Narrow Foothold 
by Carina Birman.
Hearing Eye, 29 pp., £7, August 2006, 9781905082100
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... and an overnight connection that brought them within a few miles of the Spanish border, to the small town of Banyuls. They arrived early the next day ‘in marvellous southern sunshine’ and came across a group of ‘Austrian socialists’ who said they were making for the mayor’s office. Birman and her friends followed suit and met someone in the ...

The Concept of ‘Cat Face’

Paul Taylor: Machine Learning, 11 August 2016

... can be trained to distinguish fraudulent from bona fide transactions. However, if fraud occurs in small distant purchases and in large local ones, as in Figure 1, the task of classification is too complex. The approach only works with problems that are ‘linearly separable’ and, as should be clear from Figure 1, no single straight line will separate the ...

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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... segue comes in various sizes (that was a medium). This sentence ending would qualify as a small: Einstein, replying in 1915 to a letter from Karl Schwarzschild, was ‘unaware that he was writing to a dead man’. It’s a true statement – if Einstein had known he was writing to a dead man he would presumably have stopped – but the piquant hint of ...

What mattered to Erasmus

James McConica, 2 March 1989

Erasmus’s Annotations on the New Testament. The Gospels: Facsimile of the final Latin text with all earlier variants 
edited by Anne Reeve.
Duckworth, 284 pp., £35, March 1986, 9780715619902
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Erasmus’s Annotations on the New Testament: From Philologist to Theologian 
by Erika Rummel.
Toronto, 234 pp., £24.50, January 1987, 0 8020 5683 0
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A New Rabelais Bibliography: Editions of Rabelais before 1626 
by Stephen Rawles and M.A. Screech.
Droz, 691 pp.
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The Library of Robert Burton 
by Nicholas Kiessling.
Oxford Bibliographic Society, 433 pp., £25, May 1988, 0 901420 42 5
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... reference works, universities. His languages were English and Latin, and Kiessling notes the small holdings in other tongues. By its very breadth it seems to describe the crisis facing an intellectual culture based essentially upon the mastery of all of the available texts, and the same may be said of his great work, The Anatomy of Melancholy. We are ...

Must they twinkle?

John Sutherland, 1 August 1985

British Literary Magazines. Vol. III: The Victorian and Edwardian Age 1837-1913 
edited by Alvin Sullivan.
Greenwood, 560 pp., £88.50, December 1984, 0 313 24335 2
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The Book Book 
by Anthony Blond.
Cape, 226 pp., £9.95, April 1985, 0 224 02074 9
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... the Edinburgh and Quarterly. These were long and serious to a fault, and catered to a public as small as the journals were high-minded. Politically-motivated, the quarterlies were liable to subordinate independent judgment to party ends. Anonymity ensured that the reviewer for his part subordinated personality to the collective self of the journal. There ...

Lawrence Festival

Dan Jacobson, 18 September 1980

... them, blacks, several Orientals, people who could have been Mexicans. The drums were struck, a small chant rose to the sky, and they began marching alongside the highway. They were as ragged, as obscure, as devout and self-involved, as some medieval band on an old woodcut. One might have imagined them marching from village to village, between heathlands or ...

The Dynamitards

John Horgan, 19 January 1984

Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 
by Charles Townshend.
Oxford, 445 pp., £22.50, December 1983, 0 19 821753 6
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... various ways, and partly indeed by intimidation, as has already been suggested. But, as Sir James Stephen remarked in 1886, ‘a very small amount of shooting in the leg will effectively deter an immense mass of people from paying rents which they do not want to pay.’ This quotation, as Dr Townshend points out, focuses ...

Unquiet Deaths

Patrick Parrinder, 3 September 1987

Two Lives and a Dream 
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Walter Kaiser.
Aidan Ellis, 245 pp., £9.95, July 1987, 0 85628 160 3
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The Wedding at Port-au-Prince 
by Hans Christoph Buch, translated by Ralph Manheim.
Faber, 259 pp., £10.95, August 1987, 0 571 14928 6
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Saints and Scholars 
by Terry Eagleton.
Verso, 145 pp., £9.95, September 1987, 0 86091 180 2
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Imperial Patient: The Memoirs of Nero’s Doctor 
by Alex Comfort.
Duckworth, 206 pp., £10.95, June 1987, 0 7156 2168 8
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... Port-au-Prince cinema. Nothing is left of him except a rusty dagger thrown into the harbour, and a small wet spot on the back of his seat. There are other richly entertaining episodes, including some rather blatantly steeped in literary pastiche. Buch even has a blown-up condom episode set in Weimar, as if Porterhouse Blue had been transported to the ...

Jabs

Richard Horton, 8 October 1992

Edward Jenner 1749-1823 
by Richard Fisher.
Deutsch, 361 pp., £20, July 1991, 0 233 98681 2
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... Bacon complains of biographical literature of his day. He says that actions both great and small, public and private, sho’d be so blended together as to secure that genuine nature and lively representation, which forms the peculiar excellence and use of biography.’ Fisher quotes these wise words of Jenner’s, but his book ignores them. Church ...
Selected Poems 
by James Merrill.
Carcanet, 152 pp., £9.95, April 1996, 1 85754 228 2
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... whose white gestures filled a cab, And thought of neither then nor since. Also, to clasp them, the small, red-nailed hand Of no one I can place. Wait. No. Her name, her features Lie toppled underneath that year’s fashions ... The memory comes back not all at once but in pieces. The hand is fitted in at the end of a strangely constructed line that the words ...

Next Stop, Reims

Ardis Butterfield: Medieval Literary Itineraries, 26 April 2018

Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 
by David Wallace.
Oxford, 1591 pp., £180, April 2016, 978 0 19 873535 9
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... Cambridge) and Norwich, picks out for discussion the castle at Berkeley in Gloucestershire and the small town of Lichfield. The rest of Britain is treated in the same itinerary as Iceland and Finistère: this neatly ties together the place where the Scots, Norse and Celtic languages were known. Before making this journey around the North Sea, we have travelled ...

Not an Inkling

Jerry Coyne: There’s more to life than DNA, 27 April 2000

Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters 
by Matt Ridley.
Fourth Estate, 344 pp., £8.99, February 2000, 9781857028355
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... the eugenics movements of the early 20th century, and culminating in the loudest recent salvos, Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. Given the inflammatory nature of the topic, and the powerful sociopolitical questions it raises, it would pay a writer to tread gingerly here. Will ...

White Peril

E.S. Turner: H. Rider Haggard, 20 September 2001

Diary of an African Journey (1914) 
by H. Rider Haggard.
Hurst, 345 pp., £20, August 2001, 1 85065 468 9
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... but is now published in full for the first time, edited, introduced and ably annotated by Stephen Coan of the Natal Witness. It has the fascination that goes with anything written in 1914, even though the more spectacular events of Armageddon were slated for the adjacent continent. No one should be surprised to come across words now ruled ...

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