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Cruelty to Animals

Brigid Brophy, 21 May 1981

Reckoning with the Beast 
by James Turner.
Johns Hopkins, 190 pp., £7.50, February 1981, 0 8018 2399 4
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The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes 
by S. Zuckerman.
Routledge, 511 pp., £17.50, March 1981, 0 7100 0691 8
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... very terminology does violence to the pro-animal arguments of such Victorians as Henry Salt and Bernard Shaw (born in, respectively, 1851 and 1856), whose rational and essentially political thinking on the subject was grounded in the recognition that animals have rights. Neither does Mr Turner emphasise the essential point that sensibility, old or ...

Wallpaper and Barricades

Terry Eagleton, 23 February 1995

William Morris: A Life for Our Time 
by Fiona MacCarthy.
Faber, 780 pp., £25, November 1994, 0 571 14250 8
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... English literature, radical reactionaries to a man (Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis) though not, as it happens, to a Bloomsbury woman. The advent of William Morris was the point where this ambiguous lineage finally joined the modern world. Morris was of course quite as much a neo-medievalist as Carlyle or Ruskin; but his achievement was to ...

Scientific Fraud

Peter Medawar, 17 November 1983

Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science 
by William Broad and Nicholas Wade.
Century, 256 pp., £8.95, July 1983, 0 7126 0243 7
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... reason felt themselves entitled to express an opinion. It is entirely understandable that George Bernard Shaw should have done so, but less obvious why Samuel Butler should have been among their number, especially as he expressed better than anyone else the essence of the teaching of that August Weismann who overthrew Lamarckism. Butler said that according ...

Elizabethan Spirits

William Empson, 17 April 1980

The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age 
by Frances Yates.
Routledge, 224 pp., £7.75, November 1979, 9780710003201
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... of her own range of knowledge, and she seems to ignore his views, so I may speak up. C.S. Lewis, in the first chapter of his survey of English 16th-century literature (1954), said that earlier writers had treated magic as fanciful and remote, but in this period they felt it might be going on in the next street; and one reason was a thing they ...

Oh God, what have we done?

Jackson Lears: The Strange Career of Robert Oppenheimer, 20 December 2012

Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer 
by Ray Monk.
Cape, 818 pp., £30, November 2012, 978 0 224 06262 6
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... a retreat from the world and her protectiveness toward Robert intensified when his little brother Lewis died in infancy. A third son, Frank, was born in 1912, too young to be a playmate for the lonely Robert, though they became companions as adults.* Isolated from other children at an early age, Robert developed keen intellectual abilities while his social ...

A loaf here, a fish there

Roy Porter, 15 November 1984

Science and Medicine in France: The Emergence of Experimental Physiology 1790-1855 
by John Lesch.
Harvard, 276 pp., £20, September 1984, 0 674 79400 1
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Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France 
by Dorinda Outram.
Manchester, 299 pp., £25, October 1984, 0 7190 1077 2
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... in this field through the first half of the 19th century, from Xavier Bichat to Claude Bernard, created something significantly new. For the first time, a programme of vivisection experiments upon animals was set in motion, deploying surgical intervention (sectioning, ablation, etc) to explore, under vigorously controlled conditions, problems such ...

Medieval Fictions

Stuart Airlie, 21 February 1985

Chivalry 
by Maurice Keen.
Yale, 303 pp., £12.95, April 1984, 0 300 03150 5
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The Rise of Romance 
by Eugène Vinaver.
Boydell, 158 pp., £12, February 1984, 0 85991 158 6
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War in the Middle Ages 
by Philippe Contamine, translated by Michael Jones.
Blackwell, 387 pp., £17.50, June 1984, 0 631 13142 6
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War and Government in the Middle Ages 
edited by John Gillingham and J.C. Holt.
Boydell, 198 pp., £25, July 1984, 0 85115 404 2
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Prussian Society and the German Order 
by Michael Burleigh.
Cambridge, 217 pp., £22.50, May 1984, 9780521261043
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... In doing justice to the knights, he rescues them from their detractors, Medieval and modern. St Bernard fulminated against the knights with their banners, painted shields, silver spurs and war horses clothed in silk: all this, he snorted, was not the badge of knighthood but the dress of women. More than seven centuries later another great cultural ...

On Not Getting the Credit

Brian Dillon: Eileen Gray, 23 May 2013

Eileen Gray 
Pompidou Centre, 20 February 2013 to 20 May 2013Show More
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... painting. For the first half of her long life, Gray knew everybody. At the Slade she met Wyndham Lewis, and soon made friends with the potter Bernard Leach, the explorer Henry Savage Landor and the sculptor Kathleen Bruce, later the wife of Captain Scott. Bruce found Eileen ‘loveable, though rather remote’, and noted ...

Little Philadelphias

Ange Mlinko: Imagism, 25 March 2010

The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists 
by Helen Carr.
Cape, 982 pp., £30, May 2009, 978 0 224 04030 3
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... in the continuing vitality of literature, including Yeats, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The writers, clustered in clubs or ‘gangs’, wanted to redraw the cultural map. The Victorians were moribund, their prosody stalled at the level of Felicia Hemans’s ‘Casabianca’, a paean to obedience that filled the ...

The Pissing Evile

Peter Medawar, 1 December 1983

The Discovery of Insulin 
by Michael Bliss.
Paul Harris, 304 pp., £15, September 1983, 0 86228 056 7
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... with an appropriately reverberant thunderclap, the long epoch of therapeutic nihilism described by Lewis Thomas in his most recent book.* The insulin story begins, of course, as other medical stories begin, at the bedside – with the taking of a history and an appraisal of the patient’s general health. The history would be loss of weight, debility and ...

Propellers for Noses

Dennis Duncan: The Themerson Archive, 9 June 2022

The Themerson Archive Catalogue 
edited by Jasia Reichardt and Nick Wadley.
MIT, three vols, 1000 pp., £190, November 2020, 978 1 9162474 1 3
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... At first the drawings are satirical: pompous men, moustached and bowler-hatted, ‘half Lewis Carroll, half Ionesco’, made absurd by the addition of skipping ropes or propellers for noses. Then the same characters begin to appear in her otherwise abstract, formalist paintings. In Two Bowler-Hatted Gentlemen in an Unexpected Place, the ...

Stalin is a joker

Michael Hofmann: Milan Kundera, 2 July 2015

The Festival of Insignificance 
by Milan Kundera, translated by Linda Asher.
Faber, 115 pp., £14.99, June 2015, 978 0 571 31646 5
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... realistic settings and chronological order). And then on top of that a mal-coiffed Daniel Day-Lewis – a brain surgeon, if you will – and his reiterated and creepily effective ‘Take off your clothes!’ Younger reader, I read no more. Or at least no more Kundera. He had settled in France, where he went into exile in 1975, taken French ...

Heat-Seeking

Susan Pedersen: A.J.P. Taylor, 10 May 2007

A.J.P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe 
by Chris Wrigley.
Tauris, 439 pp., £25, August 2006, 1 86064 286 1
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... his first subject and first wife in Vienna, his third wife in Hungary, and close friends (notably Lewis Namier and Michael Karolyi) among émigré intellectuals and political refugees. His later ‘plain man’ affectations notwithstanding, he was multilingual, well-travelled and knowledgeable about European music, architecture and wine. Wrigley brings out ...

Warrior, Lover, Villain, Spiv

Tom Crewe: Dance Halls, 7 January 2016

Going to the Palais: A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918-60 
by James Nott.
Oxford, 327 pp., £65, September 2015, 978 0 19 960519 4
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... many places besides the palais, including church halls, department stores (on the fifth floor of Lewis’s in Manchester, shoppers could put down their bags and dance during the day), political clubs and swimming baths – with flooring laid over the pool. Birmingham in the 1930s had 179 venues licensed for public dancing, Newcastle 251 and Glasgow 256, with ...

Widowers on the Prowl

Tom Shippey: Britain after Rome, 17 March 2011

Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070 
by Robin Fleming.
Allen Lane, 458 pp., £25, August 2010, 978 0 7139 9064 5
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... Angles and Saxons – has stuck firmly in the work of popular novelists from Rosemary Sutcliff to Bernard Cornwell and Allan Massie, and (in this case with strident claims to historical accuracy) in movies like Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004). Fleming ignores the phenomenon, and the scenario. It isn’t the only piece of historical tradition she ...

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