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Labour dies again

Ross McKibbin, 4 June 2015

... than 70 per cent of the vote were Labour. The only one to win more than forty thousand votes was Stephen Timms (East Ham), who also had the third largest majority. In the early 1950s Labour had huge and useless majorities in the mining seats; now these majorities are in the cities. The problem is its results outside urban areas: Labour made no serious ...

One Single Plan

Andrew Berry: Proto-Darwinism, 17 March 2005

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: A Visionary Naturalist 
by Hervé le Guyader, translated by Marjorie Grene.
Chicago, 302 pp., £31.50, February 2004, 0 226 47091 1
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... Geoffroy’s enthusiasm for transformationism – as evolution was known in those days – was, in Stephen Jay Gould’s accurate assessment, ‘fitful’ at best. Even the outcome has been subject to revision. Goethe may have considered Geoffroy the winner, but others have with equal conviction accorded Cuvier the laurels, seeing his as a victory of sound ...

Meringue-utan

Rosemary Hill: Rosamund Lehmann’s Disappointments, 8 August 2002

Rosamond Lehmann 
by Selina Hastings.
Chatto, 476 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 7011 6542 1
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... The overthrow of the awful Edwardians, the triumph of Bloomsbury over the Kensington of Leslie Stephen, were unmitigated joys. Lehmann, who published her first novel, Dusty Answer, to sensational acclaim in 1927, smoked, danced and divorced her way through the interwar years with gayer abandon than most. During one particularly frank sexual discussion at a ...

Intergalactic Jesus

Jerry Coyne: Darwinian Christians, 9 May 2002

Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion 
by Michael Ruse.
Cambridge, 242 pp., £16.95, December 2001, 0 521 63144 0
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... often try to harmonise the two by declaring that they are mutually exclusive domains, or, to use Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase, ‘non-overlapping magisteria’. Gould proposes that science limit itself to studying and explaining the natural world, and religion to studying human purposes, meanings and values. Michael Ruse’s book is an astonishing ...

Persons outside the Law

Catherine Hall: The Atlantic Family, 19 July 2018

Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 
by Daniel Livesay.
North Carolina, 448 pp., £45, January 2018, 978 1 4696 3443 2
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... Marryat, were the illegitimate daughters of white men. They never married, allowing them to act as small businesswomen particularly in urban areas. White men were their route to a freedom which brought with it the possibility of enslaving others. The​ families Livesay has tracked tend to be those in which fathers felt some affection and concern, albeit with ...

Diary

Christopher Nicholson: Rare Birds, 22 November 2018

... cream-coloured coursers thought fit to enter Egdon no more.’ The cream-coloured courser is a small and beautiful plover, just over ten inches tall. The colour of its plumage is a complicated mixture of whites, buffs, greys and browns that shade smoothly into each other and perhaps give the impression of cream, or pale sand. Its beak is black, its claws ...

Rare, Obsolete, New, Peculiar

Daisy Hay: Dictionary People, 19 October 2023

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary 
by Sarah Ogilvie.
Chatto, 384 pp., £22, September, 978 1 78474 493 9
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... infrastructure projects: the building of the Forth rail bridge, or the construction by Leslie Stephen (himself a contributor to the OED) of his monumental Dictionary of National Biography.Ogilvie points out that for many years the OED wasn’t as stable or institutionally protected as such analogies suggest. Its founders were determined that their ...

Break your bleedin’ heart

Michael Wood: Proust’s Otherness, 4 January 2024

Swann’s Way 
by Marcel Proust, translated by James Grieve.
NYRB, 450 pp., £16.99, June, 978 1 68137 629 5
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The Swann Way 
by Marcel Proust, translated by Brian Nelson.
Oxford, 430 pp., £9.99, September, 978 0 19 887152 1
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... his. He died before he was able to turn to Proust’s last volume, which was translated first by Stephen Hudson and later by Andreas Mayor. In 1981 Terence Kilmartin published a revision of the whole text, making ‘extensive alterations’ but hoping to ‘have preserved the undoubted felicity’ of much of the work. The new wordings were a matter partly of ...

This is the end

Robert Cioffi: Apocalypse Then, 18 August 2022

Apocalypse and Golden Age: The End of the World in Greek and Roman Thought 
by Christopher Star.
Johns Hopkins, 320 pp., £40.50, December 2021, 978 1 4214 4163 4
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... like the human body:… Even now the world’s great age is brokenAnd earth worn out scarce bears small animals,…We wear out oxen, wear out the strength of farmers,Wear down the ploughshare in fields that can scarce feed us,So do they now grudge their fruits and multiply our toil.As Star observes, Lucretius reconfigures Hesiod’s narrative of human ...

In Need of a New Myth

Eric Foner: American Myth-Making, 4 July 2024

A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America 
by Richard Slotkin.
Harvard, 512 pp., £29.95, March, 978 0 674 29238 3
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... nomination for president in 1960 carried this implication.) The myth of a West dominated by small family farms (Jefferson’s vision of the future) had already given way to the idea that the region was home to what Slotkin calls ‘bonanza capitalism’, the possibility of instant riches derived from successive gold rushes, a burgeoning oil industry and ...

Kermode’s Changing Times

P.N. Furbank, 7 March 1991

The Uses of Error 
by Frank Kermode.
Collins, 432 pp., £18, February 1991, 9780002154659
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... itself) and with the identity of form and meaning. Merely – though of course it was not a small ‘merely’ – he argued against the hermetic tendencies of Symboliste aesthetics. He praised Yeats for insisting that poetry was made for ordinary human beings and for ignoring the forbidding notice ‘No through road to action’, and he contested the ...

How many speed bumps?

Gavin Francis: Pain, 21 August 2014

The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers 
by Joanna Bourke.
Oxford, 396 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 0 19 968942 2
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... squandered and their admission to heaven put at risk. Pain relief might be administered in small doses, except to those such as lapsed Catholics – the fear being that even small doses might prevent them from returning to the religion of their baptism. In the same volume Eugene Tesson, a Jesuit, sanctioned ...

Diary

Sean Wilsey: Going Slow, 17 July 2008

... as abundant as static on a broken TV. At 9 a.m. on a Wednesday, I honked the horn in front of a small adobe where Michael had spent the night with some friends. It was a clear sound in the dry desert air. Michael had left Marfa for Canada but flew back for the drive. On the phone we’d planned the trip as follows: always take back roads, eat only in ...
... may be comical, too, since the chain of logic, inevitably, is made up of both large beads and small beads, so that if an end-result is a very small bead – the governor in a Swiss rest-home – it is grotesquely out of proportion with the horrors that had led up to it. Much of this appearance of logic is due to the ...

Come and Stay

Arnold Rattenbury, 27 November 1997

England and the Octopus 
by Clough Williams-Ellis.
CPRE, 220 pp., £10.95, December 1996, 0 946044 50 3
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Clough Williams-Ellis: RIBA Drawings Monograph No 2 
by Richard Haslam.
Academy, 112 pp., £24.95, March 1996, 1 85490 430 2
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Clough Williams-Ellis: The Architect of Portmeirion 
by Jonah Jones.
Seren, 204 pp., £9.95, December 1996, 1 85411 166 3
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... both spirits and diet by means of the Edwardian weekend house-party, picking up cottage or small-house commissions almost as if they were dance-partners. Indeed in a round about manner he landed his castle, Llangoed Hall, that way. He acknowledged this kind of luck almost as much as his lack of technical training – three months at the Architectural ...

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