Dec 8, 2008

Things Noted Here and There

by Cliopatria

In Matthew Reisz,"Doctor, doctor, quick, quick," THES, 4 December, Vanderbilt's Peter Lake and Kevin Sharpe of Queen Mary, University of London, argue that rigid completion requirements are producing British doctoral programs inferior to those in elite American institutions.

Toni Bentley,"The Man Who Loved Women," NYT, 5 December, reviews Ian Kelly's Casanova: Actor Lover Priest Spy.

Oonagh Walsh,"Madness and Murder," THES, 4 December, reviews Pauline Prior's Madness and Murder: Gender, Crime and Mental Disorder in Nineteenth-Century Ireland.

Nicholas Delbanco,"America's Poet as Brother," Washington Post, 7 December, reviews Robert Roper's Now The Drum Of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War.

James Trefil,"Very Small, Very Weird," Washington Post, 7 December, reviews Louisa Gilder's The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn.

Stefan Collini,"Trilling's Sandbags," The Nation, 3 December, reviews a new edition of Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, with an introduction by Louis Menand.

Witold Rybczynski,"Master Builder," NYT, 5 December, reviews Nicholas Fox Weber's Le Corbusier: A Life and Le Corbusier Le Grande.

More Comments:

Christopher Thompson - 12/8/2008

It may well be the case that the best American doctoral theses have improved substantially. It may also be true that theses from provincial universities in the U.K. are more rapidly completed than in the past. There are definitely far more of them than twenty or thirty years ago. But there has been no noticeable fall in the quality of work produced by postgraduates at Cambridge University, now the major centre for early modern historical studies in the British Isles, or, to the best of my knowledge, at Oxford. These are the universities in which Professors Lake and Sharpe were trained. One suspects that there may be an element of nostalgia about their concerns, possibly even a degree of loss of contact with these academic powerhouses!