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At Thaddaeus Ropac

John-Paul Stonard: Joseph Beuys, 16 March 2023

... performances, but the beneficiaries were always humans.The special status of the human, for Beuys, lay in the capacity to achieve freedom through creativity – thus his famous dictum: ‘Every man is an artist.’ As his drawings show, this was not a matter of technique – he quickly abandoned his natural facility – but rather of making imaginative ...

Gang of Four

Christopher Driver, 22 December 1983

The String Quartet: A History 
by Paul Griffiths.
Thames and Hudson, 240 pp., £12, October 1983, 9780500013113
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Gyorgy Ligeti 
by Paul Griffiths.
Robson, 128 pp., £8.95, October 1983, 0 86051 240 1
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... criticism of George Bernard Shaw and Ezra Pound, to name two writers whose main preoccupations lay elsewhere. But in our own day almost all composition, and much performance, is virtually invulnerable to non-specialist critique. Paul Griffiths, who has already reached the C major of this life by becoming in his ...

Fortress Mathematica

Brian Rotman: John Nash and Paul Erdos, 17 September 1998

The Man who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdös and the Search for Mathematical Truth 
by Paul Hoffman.
Fourth Estate, 320 pp., £12.99, July 1998, 1 85702 811 2
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Proofs from the Book 
by Martin Aigner and Günter Ziegler.
Springer, 210 pp., £19, August 1998, 3 540 63698 6
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A Beautiful Mind: Genius and Schizophrenia in the Life of John Nash 
by Sylvia Nasar.
Faber, 464 pp., £17.99, September 1998, 0 571 17794 8
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... consumed by numbers to the exclusion of all else, sounds deranged. The Hungarian mathematician, Paul Erdös, number theorist and combinatorialist extraordinary, eccentric, socially dysfunctional, obsessive, childishly egocentric, helplessly dependent on fellow number freaks to feed him, transport him, put him up and put up with him, was certainly outside ...

Dismantling the class war

Paul Addison, 25 July 1991

The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950. Vol I.: Regions and Communities 
edited by F.M.L. Thompson.
Cambridge, 608 pp., June 1990, 0 521 25788 3
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The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950. Vol II.: People and Their Environment 
edited by F.M.L. Thompson.
Cambridge, 392 pp., June 1990, 0 521 25789 1
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The Temper of the Times: British Society since World War Two 
by Bill Williamson.
Blackwell, 308 pp., £30, August 1990, 0 631 15919 3
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... and self-help were the best means of resolving them. As they saw it, the key to social reform lay in the readiness of people in all classes to accept their social responsibilities. If society were to unload its responsibilities onto the central government, the result would necessarily be an irresponsible society. The Victorians had some reason to ...

The Aestheticising Vice

Paul Seabright: Systematic knowledge, 27 May 1999

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed 
by James C. Scott.
Yale, 464 pp., £25, May 1998, 0 300 07016 0
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... Scientific forestry began as an attempt to map the forests so that their owners could know what lay in them. It was an enterprise inspired partly by the ideals of Linnaeus, mostly by the urge for profit, but it soon turned into a different kind of undertaking altogether. The forests that were first mapped were complex, visually anarchic eco-systems. They ...

Buggering on

Paul Addison, 21 July 1983

Winston Churchill: Companion Vol. V, Part III, The Coming of War 1936-1939 
by Martin Gilbert.
Heinemann, 1684 pp., £75, October 1982, 0 434 29188 9
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Finest Hour: Winston Churchill, 1939-1941 
by Martin Gilbert.
Heinemann, 1308 pp., £15.95, June 1983, 0 434 29187 0
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Churchill 1874-1915 
by Ted Morgan.
Cape, 571 pp., £12.50, April 1983, 0 224 02044 7
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The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 
by William Manchester.
Michael Joseph, 973 pp., £14.95, June 1983, 0 7181 2275 5
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... Byron’s lines from Childe Harold: A thousand years scarce serve to form a state, An hour may lay it in the dust. In retrospect, it may seem that Britain had only to hang on until the United States entered the war, a hope dangled before the House of Commons in some of Churchill’s speeches. But Churchill greatly feared that the trickle of United States ...

Zoning Out and In

Christopher Tayler: Richard Ford, 30 November 2006

The Lay of the Land 
by Richard Ford.
Bloomsbury, 485 pp., £17.99, October 2006, 0 7475 8188 6
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... it all sounded just fine’, and settled down to raise a family. Ralph (b. 1970) was followed by Paul (b. 1973) and Clarissa (b. 1975). After Ralph’s death, Frank’s dreaminess began to manifest itself in various ways. In the two years between the death and his divorce, he explains, ‘I must’ve slept with 18 different women – a number I don’t ...

The Charm before the Storm

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 9 July 1987

Speak, Memory 
by Vladimir Nabokov.
Penguin, 242 pp., £3.95, May 1987, 0 14 008623 4
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The Russian Album 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 191 pp., £12.95, May 1987, 0 7011 3109 8
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The Making of a Peacemonger: The Memoirs of George Ignatieff 
prepared in association with by Sonja Sinclair.
Toronto, 265 pp., £15, July 1985, 0 8020 2556 0
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A Little of All These: An Estonian Childhood 
by Tania Alexander.
Cape, 165 pp., £12.50, March 1987, 0 224 02400 0
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... it was clear that, like Nabokov’s mother, she had committed every detail to memory. She met Paul Ignatieff in Cannes in February 1903 and they were married six weeks later in an Orthodox church in Nice. The trunk which carried her trousseau back to Russia is now in an attic above the garage of her oldest surviving son’s house in ...

Diary

Philip Horne and Danny Karlin: Million Dollar Bashers, 22 June 1989

... the Madison suite of Sacha’s Hotel in Manchester (motto: ‘Sacha’s Only Looks Expensive’), Paul Williams recalls an unrewarding encounter with Bob Dylan: ‘But I shook his hand which was ... and this was at the beginning of the tour ... and things changed significantly during the tour ... he became more sociable, I’ve been talking to a number of ...

Founding Moments

Stuart Macintyre, 11 March 1993

The Oxford History of Australia. Vol. II, 1770-1860: Possessions 
by Jan Kociumbas.
Oxford, 397 pp., £25, September 1992, 0 19 554610 5
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The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony: Law and Power in Early New South Wales 
by David Neal.
Cambridge, 266 pp., £30, March 1992, 9780521372640
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Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838, George Gipps and the British Conquest of New South Wales 
by Roger Milliss.
McPhee Gribble, 965 pp., February 1992, 0 86914 156 2
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Living in a New Country: History, Travelling and Language 
by Paul Carter.
Faber, 214 pp., £14.99, July 1992, 0 571 16329 7
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... in accordance with ‘a self-protective incuriosity about origins’. Tasmania’s origins lay in an act of genocidal conquest and a penal experiment, both of which were so recent and so omnipresent in their effect as to make recollection intolerable. There are certainly striking instances of this desire for amnesia. The reiterated claim that the ...

Garbo & Co

Paul Addison, 28 June 1990

1940: Myth and Reality 
by Clive Ponting.
Hamish Hamilton, 263 pp., £15.99, May 1990, 0 241 12668 1
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British Intelligence in the Second World War. Vol. IV: Security and Counter-Intelligence 
by F.H. Hinsley and C.A.G. Simkins.
HMSO, 408 pp., £15.95, April 1990, 0 11 630952 0
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Unauthorised Action: Mountbatten and the Dieppe Raid 1942 
by Brian Loring Villa.
Oxford, 314 pp., £15, March 1990, 0 19 540679 6
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... The problem for patriots in 1940 was the necessity of selling out to somebody, and as the choice lay between Germany and the United States, there was obviously much to be said for the Americans. In Ponting’s view, Britain’s dependence on the United States gave rise to a paradox. The special relationship demonstrated that Britain was no longer a great ...

Conversations with Rorty

Paul Seabright, 16 June 1983

Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980 
by Richard Rorty.
Harvester, 237 pp., £22.50, February 1983, 0 7108 0403 2
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... all, John Dewey could rescue it if only it would listen. The hope for the future, he suggested, lay in Dewey’s vision of a culture no longer dominated by a hierarchy of disciplines (which had placed science in an aristocratic position, maintained by philosophy acting as an intellectual Debrett’s to expose the arrivistes), a culture in which the arts and ...

I jolly well would have

Paul Foot, 20 August 1992

Claire clairmont and the Shelleys 
by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton.
Oxford, 281 pp., £20, April 1992, 0 19 818594 4
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Mab’s Daughters 
by Judith Chernaik.
Pan, 229 pp., £5.99, July 1992, 0 330 32379 2
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... They fondle each other a little, and then ‘he spread his cape on the fallen leaves, and when we lay together it seemed very natural and inevitable. We were entirely private and what passed between us had nothing to do with anyone else, it was between the two of us only, and I felt loving and content.’ That is probably as close to the truth as it is ...

The Whole Orang

Paul Smith, 12 March 1992

Darwin 
by Adrian Desmond and James Moore.
Joseph, 808 pp., £20, October 1991, 0 7181 3430 3
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... This is neither an exposition nor an analysis of his contribution to scientific thought, and few lay readers at the end of it will be ready to sit a paper on Darwinian biology. It is a sustained essay in the sociology of knowledge production, and one which seems sometimes to employ a dangerously reductionist, even a wilfully contrived model. No one thinks in ...

Half Bird, Half Fish, Half Unicorn

Paul Foot, 16 October 1997

Peter Cook: A Biography 
by Harry Thompson.
Hodder, 516 pp., £18.99, September 1997, 0 340 64968 2
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... be said of me that I have never ever stratted my work. This is one thing I have never done. I can lay my hand on my heart, or indeed anyone else’s heart, and say: ‘I have never stratted my work, never stratted at all.’ I think what you probably wanted to know is where I started my work. You’ve completely misread the question. Another method was ...

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