Oxford Music in 2012
2012 has been an eventful year for the OUP music teams. We’re in reflective mood as the year draws to a close, so we thought we’d share our highlights of 2012.
In his own voice: H.L.A. Hart in conversation with David Sugarman
By David Sugarman
This recording of my lengthy interview with H.L.A. Hart (1907–1992) has been resurrected from my audio tapes and given new life. Dusted and digitalized, the result is something quite beautiful. Here is Hart in his own words recorded in 1988, reviewing his life, his work, and his significance. The interview presents Hart as three individuals: legal philosopher, interviewee, and critic. The recording adds another dimension to our understanding of Hart that must be incorporated into our collective memory.
The Day-Lewis Lincoln: (racial) frontiersman
By Jim Cullen
As anyone vaguely familiar with his work knows, Day-Lewis is legendary for the extraordinary variety of characters he has played, and the vertiginous psychological depth with which he has played them. I first became aware of Day-Lewis in early 1985, when, in the space of a week, I watched him portray the priggish Cecil Vyse in the tony Merchant-Ivory film adaptation of E.M. Forster’s Room with a View and then saw him play Johnny, the punk East End homosexual, in Stephen Frears’s brilliantly brash My Beautiful Launderette.
Unravelling the life of Henry Cowell without unravelling the biographer
By Joel Sachs
As I began to go through papers at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, I was buffeted by competing forces: the exhilaration of unravelling the stunning reality of a man’s life, and the growing fear that, should I actually live to read all of the documents, I might never be able to digest them.
An Anatomy of #Eastwooding
By David Karpf
Clint Eastwood took the stage at the Republican convention last week and gave a… well, let’s call it a memorable performance. I’m not sure if there’s ever been such a bizarre prime time address given at a national convention. The celebrated actor/director spent eleven minutes in a mumbling debate with an empty chair representing President Obama. Political conventions are highly scripted events. Eastwood’s extended, failed ad lib was anything but scripted.
The Oxford Companion to the London 2012 Opening Ceremony
Many questioned how the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games Opening Ceremony was going to make a mark after the spectacular Beijing Olympics only four years earlier. While Beijing presented the Chinese people moving as one body — dancing, marching, and presenting a united front to the world — the British answer was a chaotic and spirited ceremony, shifting from cricket matches to coordinated dance routines, Mr Bean’s comedic dream to a 100-foot Lord Voldemort.
British Olympic lives
By Mark Curthoys
The London Games have unsurprisingly stimulated renewed interest in Britain’s Olympic heritage. The National Archives has made available online records of the modern Olympic and Paralympic Games. Chariots of Fire (1981), the film which tells the story of the sprint gold medals won in Paris in 1924 by Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, has been re-released. English Heritage commemorative blue plaques have recently been unveiled in London at the homes of Abrahams and his coach Sam Mussabini.
Presidents, protest, and patriotism
By Andrew J. Polsky
In the midst of a military conflict, domestic antiwar opposition always vexes a president. This reaction is understandable. He sees the criticism as a risk to national security, something that will give aid and comfort to the enemy, demoralize American troops in combat, and weaken the resolve of the public. What he fails to appreciate is how protest serves as a warning that something has gone very wrong with his war.
Does the Supreme Court care what the public think?
As we continue to look back on Thursday’s Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act, the question of how the Court’s opinion was influenced by the public has been raised. To provide some background, we excerpted The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction by Linda Greenhouse.
Health care reform and federalism’s tug of war within
By Erin Ryan
This month, the Supreme Court will decide what some believe will be among the most important cases in the history of the institution. In the “Obamacare” cases, the Court considers whether the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) exceeds the boundaries of federal authority under the various provisions of the Constitution that establish the relationship between local and national governance. Its response will determine the fate of Congress’s efforts to grapple with the nation’s health care crisis, and perhaps other legislative responses to wicked regulatory problems like climate governance or education policy.
‘The Unholy Mrs Knight’ and the BBC
By Callum Brown
In 1955 Margaret Knight became the most hated woman in Britain. She was vilified and demonised in virtually every British newspaper, and thousands of letters attacking her were sent by ordinary Britons to the BBC, to the papers and to her personally. Parents wrote fearing for the safety of their children, bishops and priests criticised her impudence, whilst well-known authors like Dorothy L Sayers castigated her ignorance. Hounded by journalists and pursued by photographers, the smiling image of Mrs Knight in her ‘Sunday-best hat’ and coat appeared in most newspapers. She was the nation’s number one ‘folk devil’ of 1955.
Is there an epidemic of autism?
By Mary Coleman
Autism was first described in 1943 and since then, the understanding of this disease entity by the scientific community has greatly changed. In 2012, autism is now considered a behaviorally defined neurodevelopmental disorder arising well before birth, characterized by a marked clinical and etiological heterogeneity. Recently there is a question whether there may be an epidemic of autism, as the rates of diagnosis have continued to rise to alarming levels.
Women and children first? The enduring myths of the Titanic
By Sarah Gregson
It is often said of military wars that the first casualty is truth. As we approach the centenary of the sinking of RMS Titanic and the war of ideas that often surrounds this tragedy, it is to be hoped that the truth will at least take a few prisoners. Titanic myths have had extraordinary longevity and, as Cox put it, ‘virtually everything that people know, or think they know … can be traced to the press coverage of April-August 1912’. In the lead up to the centenary, however, perhaps some commentators will read some of the work that has been done to challenge these misconceptions.
Questions about the connection between law and mind sciences
The law is based on reasoned analysis, devoid of ideological biases or unconscious influences. Judges frame their decisions as straightforward applications of an established set of legal doctrines, principles, and mandates to a given set of facts. Or so we think. We sat down with Director of the Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School (PLMS) and editor of Ideology, Psychology, and Law, Professor Jon Hanson, to discuss the interaction of psychology and the law, and how they interact to form ideologies by which we all must live.
Rick Santorum wins in Louisiana
Rick Santorum had a great night, but he would need to win 70 percent of the delegates moving forward to unseat frontrunner Mitt Romney. That’s not going to happen, but it’ll be a painful road toward the increasingly inevitable. As late in this game, powerful conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Rush Limbaugh, and Tony Perkins are still advocating for Rick Santorum and other non-moderate candidates. Every day they continue to do this, they make less likely confident predictions from outside the beltway that Republicans will come together in the Fall against Obama.
David Gascoyne and the missing portrait
By Robert Fraser
I am often asked to name my favourite poem by the British writer David Gascoyne (1916-2001), my biography of whom appears with OUP this month. Bearing in mind Gascoyne was in his time an interpreter of Surrealism, an existentialist of a religious variety and a proponent of ecology, you might expect me to go for a poem along these lines. Instead, I usually choose a poem of the early 1940s entitled “Odeur de Pensée.”