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The unease of motion Humility alone designs Those short but admirable lines, By which ungirt and unconstrained, Things greater are in less contained. Let others vainly strive t’immure The circle in the quadrature! These holy mathematics can In every figure equal man. Yet thus the laden house does sweat, And scarce endures the Master great: But where he comes the swelling hall Stirs, and the square grows spherical. Andrew Marvell, ‘Upon Appleton House’, ll. 40–521 In merely twelve lines, the English poet Andrew Marvell contemptuously dismissed the well
In a letter published on the front page of the Independent in May 1993 as part of a campaign to halt the closure of St Bartholemew's Hospital, Derek Jarman wrote that ‘Without our past our future cannot be reflected, the past is the mirror’. 1 At the time, he was still regularly keeping a journal that examined his past and commented on his present (see Figure 26 ). Published for the first time in 2000, Smiling in Slow Motion contains diary entries spanning almost three years, dated between
of travel at sea. 1 ‘We live in stirring times,’ its author enthuses, ‘all is now bustle, motion, progress, change.’ 2 In attempting to convey the revolutionary changes brought about by P&O's introduction of a regular steam service to the voyage East less than two decades before, the article mobilises the vocabulary of a modernity subject to constant transformation and instability: a present in constant flux. This was a modernity characterised as both chronological
6 Motion as mode of perception As owners offered their guests these physical and mental invitations to motion across house and estate, both owner and guest well knew by the turn of the century that they were experiencing tangible extensions of a continuous mobility permeating their daily lives. The English landscape through which they travelled between city and country and between estates contained a new ease of motion particularly showcased in atlases, the pendulum clock ticked out even the tiny seconds of daily experience, and familiar solid objects were
5 The disciplinary distraction of motion When guests moved through the interior and garden spaces beyond the façade that offered such cues to motion, they found themselves enveloped in the perpetual changeability described by poets and encountered across social practice. In once enclosed entertaining rooms, vistas stretched before them through doors and windows to reveal long sweeps of interior and exterior space, while the walls of these rooms suggested sequences of events that could occur before their surprised eyes. And they walked through gardens that
Chapter 4 Extraction in motion: infrastructure-as-asset-class 4.1 Yield hogs For investors, ‘infrastructure’ is now an ‘asset class’,1 the boundaries of which are limited only by the ability of finance to build new contracted income streams that extract wealth, directly or indirectly, from the activities that surround the funding, construction and operation of infrastructure facilities. What started off with investments in so-called economic infrastructure (utilities, roads, ports, airports and the like) now include investments in resource/ commodity
5 Opposition in slow motion The CPGB’s ‘anti-revisionists’ in the 1960s and 1970s Lawrence Parker In common with other national parties in the world ‘official’ communist movement, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) gave birth to pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet inner-party oppositional groupings in the 1960s and 1970s. While there were important structural impediments to the growth of such oppositions,1 this article focuses particularly on the ideological problems associated with these trends and thus maps out a thesis as to why such groups proved to be a
modernity. The omnibus doesn’t merely represent change, motion, and flux: it embodies it. If the Physiologie is full of omnibus statistics, omnibus vignettes, omnibus jokes and omnibus quips typical of this satirical genre, it concludes with a strikingly poetic and disquieting image of a nocturnal omnibus as a mythological creature, a shape-shifting ‘monstre fantastique’ (fantastic monster) that glides through the night: Les lanternes de l’omnibus jettent sur les voyageurs des reflets verts et jaunes qui s’attachant ça et là sur un visage, un chapeau, un profil
2 Putting images into (e)motion: representing Africa through suffering Africa, representation, and suffering There is another sense in which Africa is difficult to see. To see Africa one must first see oneself. (Okri, 2009: 8) Emotive images On 13 May 2000, The Economist carried a front page image of a young Sierra Leonean man with a gun. The lead title on the page was ‘Africa: the Hopeless Continent’. It provoked a strong response from African writers who despaired at the negative imagery and text. Previously, and equally infamously, writer Robert Kaplan on
9780719078729_4_005.qxd 11/26/08 10:34 Page 142 Chapter 5 Matter, motion, and Newtonian public science, 1720–41 B y the time Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727 contemporary enthusiasm for natural philosophy had ensured that it had crossed the threshold of the rooms at the Royal Society to become firmly established as part of a national discourse. We need only look at the newspapers of the day to see how far natural philosophy had captured imaginations and created a market niche. Advertisements offered consumers the opportunity to hold the world figuratively in