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Index: The Fortnightly Review of Books

On the Road to Pantisocracy.

Thursday, 20 January 2011

Andrew Mitchell: There was the dinner, long after the break-up of their friendship, where both Wordsworth and Coleridge were present, one at either end of the dining table. Crabb Robinson eavesdropped on both conversations, Wordsworth was quoting his own poems, Coleridge was quoting Wordsworth.

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Rimbaud’s mad boat: Some thoughts on translating poetry.

Sunday, 9 January 2011

Martin Sorrell: I wonder if purists work on the principle, which may or may not be unconscious, that there is one ideal translation for every poem, which, once attained, will put paid to the need for all others. On the other hand, is it that the translator who goes for versions is a relativist who can live with imperfection? Fabulous things have come out of the latter position. Wasn’t the King James Bible translated by a committee of relativists? Some purists say that if you want the truth, you’ll have to go back further, to the Hebrew and Greek.

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A nearly forgotten man of many universes.

Thursday, 9 December 2010

John Derbyshire: Down in the subatomic realm, each of the particles that constitute matter is smeared out over a volume of space in a manner described mathematically by a “wave function.” When an observer interacts with this wave function by taking a measurement, the wave function suddenly manifests as a particle with a position and speed to which numbers can be assigned. It ceases to be a quantum-mechanical phenomenon and becomes a “classical” one.

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A solution to the mystery of Macbeth’s witches.

Saturday, 20 November 2010

W. J. Lawrence: Plague had occasioned the closing of the playhouses in July 1608 and, save for a few days at Christmas, acting was not permitted again till late in November of the following year. One result of this, it would seem, was that Shakespeare, no longer a player and wearied out by his spell of corrosive inaction, retired for good to Stratford-on-Avon, thenceforth only taking occasional trips to town to bring his old associates a new play and to receive from them his dividends as “housekeeper.”

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Art, in the days when the patron was the dole.

Sunday, 14 November 2010

State of Emergency: Britain 1970-1974. It was four dozen months in which Britain lost the Beatles, but gained Edward Heath. It certainly seemed to be an out-of-balance moment. But culturally, it may have been, as one of our reviewers writes, a ‘golden age’. Twin reviews by Anthony Howell and Michelene Wandor.

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Art, in the days when the patron was the dole.

Saturday, 13 November 2010

Anthony Howell: I shake my head at our attempts to conjure up the dream that is the past, especially the more or less immediate past. One friend of mine started a dream notebook, but stopped when the dream of the night before took more than 24 hours to jot down.

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The Rosenbergs and their persistent apologists.

Monday, 25 October 2010

Allen M. Hornblum: Little more than a last-gasp attempt to prop up the dispirited and dwindling Rosenberg forces, Final Verdict (barely 200 pages, with only 22 footnotes) promises “a surprising new narrative of the case” and one that actually “stands on its head” what the Schneirs and “millions of others formerly believed.”

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Dostoyevski and the religion of suffering 5.

Thursday, 16 September 2010

Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé: It would have taken me some time to form a judgement had I not suddenly had a vision of that life, born in a hospital, brought up in misery, in sickness, in pain, to be continued in Siberian prisons, in the barracks; ever pursued by want and moral distress, always being crushed and yet ennobled by the work of a – Redeemer. Then I understood that this persecuted soul escaped all known standards…

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The Wonders of Man in the Age of Simulations.

Monday, 9 August 2010

Roger Berkowitz: A new urgency has energized those who welcome and those who fear the power of man to transform his nature. While hopes of technological utopias and fears of technological dystopias may be part and parcel of the human condition itself, we are living through a moment when extraordinary technological advances are once again raising the question of what it means to be human.

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Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy.

Friday, 16 July 2010

Juliet du Boulay: To recognize the enduring quality of much that I describe is not, however, to ignore the fact that change has always been a part of village life, and indeed so many changes have happened since I was in Ambeli in the 1960s and 1970s that much of the way of life recounted here can no longer be found. Earlier changes begin with the village itself, which had been built around 1800 by families who escaped there from a lower village which had been devastated by the Turks. Before this some of the big families were said to have come in a boat from the north, perhaps Pelion. These upheavals, however, dramatic though they were, did not necessitate a deep change of values but simply a reinterpretation of ancient themes in the new situation.

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Dostoyevski and the religion of suffering 4.

Thursday, 8 July 2010

Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé: It cannot be repeated too often: it is the characters of those resolute men which take hold of the people, not their ideas; and the philosopher’s piercing eye in this matter looks beyond Russia. Men are everywhere becoming less and less unreasonable as regards ideas, and more and more skeptical as regards cut-and-dried formulas. Those who believe in the virtue of absolute doctrines are now rare to find. What does captivate men is character, even if their energies are put to a wrong purpose, for that guarantees a leader and a guide, the first requirements of an association of human beings. Man is born the “serf” of every will stronger than his own that passes before him.

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Prohibition: False glamour, lax enforcement.

Thursday, 24 June 2010

Andrew Sinclair: The running style in this extended account is that of a newsman, sniffing out the good stories. And there are plenty of them, from that golden age of gossip and occasional retribution. Although there is a great deal of dazzle and detail, there is little new in the causes and consequences of Prohibition – the rural saloon and the rise of women’s rights, the conflict of the country against the city, the attack on foreigners and the surge of nativism, and the economic reasons for Repeal.

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Dostoyevski and the religion of suffering 3.

Sunday, 13 June 2010

Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé: One feels angry with the author for being so prolix, one runs on ahead of him, and, all of a sudden, he is no longer understood – the electric current has been interrupted. That, at least, is what everybody tells me who has tried it.

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Two poems from the hôpital Broussais, September 1893.

Thursday, 3 June 2010

Nicolson: ‘The real centre of his hospital life was, however, to be the Hôpital Broussais, in the rue Didot, which he first entered in December 1886. Verlaine always had a weakness for this particular hospital. ‘

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Straws in the religious wind?

Friday, 28 May 2010

Anthony O’Hear: It is interesting to see in these three very different books some thoughtful intellectuals demurring from the secularism which had until recently reigned virtually unchallenged among the self-professed thinking classes.

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