George F. Kennan: An American Life
A grand strategist of the Cold War era had moments of burnished majesty, learns Alex Danchev
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The Roof at the Bottom of the World: Discovering the Transantarctic Mountains
The three elements of a polar atlas are fascinating but don't quite make a whole, says Robert Mayhew
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Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, 1784-1807
While thanking earlier scholars of Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth in the preface to her new book, Jacqueline Labbe remarks that "in researching it I have learned vaster amounts than have made...
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Kiss My Relics: Hermaphroditic Fictions of the Middle Ages
Let's start with the title. It's a shocker. Not only does it suggest, misleadingly, a humorous tome on medieval saints and their appendages, but its register seems quite inappropriate to what is in...
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The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen
Graham Farmelo applauds an ambitious scientific work, but warns that it's not for the fainthearted
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The Cost of Inequality: Three Decades of the Super-Rich and the Economy
Many people would agree that a society in which a chief executive officer earns not five or 10 but 100 times as much as the average full-time worker is not a fair society. A series of recent studies...
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Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature: The Country Poor in the Great Depression
When the anthology Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s was published in 2006, one contribution struck a discordant note. While the other essays typically...
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Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay and the Vichy Dilemma
The actions of a Jewish gay icon in wartime France were iffy, not treacherous, argues Matthew Feldman
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How We See the Sky: A Naked-eye Tour of Day & Night
In a book that considers the appearance of the heavens from the point of view of naked-eye observations on the Earth's surface, Thomas Hockey writes about the practical astronomy that anyone can do...
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The Bible Now
A commonplace distinction in biblical studies is that between "what it meant" and "what it means". The authors of The Bible Now, who are experts on the Old Testament (or, for Jews, the Hebrew Bible...
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Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories
Still looking for Christmas gifts? You might be inspired by a book on Renaissance accessories. Matthew Reisz writes
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The Pick - Government Art Collection, Selected by Simon Schama: Travelling Light
Government Art Collection, Selected by Simon Schama: Travelling LightWhitechapel Gallery, London, until 26 FebruaryAt 25, Lord Byron was the ultimate matinee idol, posing in Albanian dress with...
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Diary
BBC Radio 4The Mumbai ChuzzlewitsConvinced that his relatives are after his money, wealthy old landlord Martin Chuzzlewit has adopted an orphan called Mary as his carer. Although she will be housed...
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Deck the Halls
A Personal Christmas Message from the Office of the President and Vice-ChancellorThis is inevitably that very special time of year when the thoughts of all those of us who continue to uphold and...
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Leader: They won't want to be stuffed
Universities cherish autonomy. When government strings truss them like Christmas turkeys, some might break for freedom