Word: hedgehog
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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RUSSIAN THINKERS by Isaiah Berlin Viking; 312 pages; $14.95 "The fox knows many things," the Greek poet Archilochus wrote in one of his fragments. "The hedgehog knows one big thing." Sir Isaiah Berlin the political philosopher, used that enigmatic formula as the framework for one of the most luminous essays of the century, The Hedgehog and the Fox, a study of Tolstoy first published in 1951. Berlin divided the world's writers and thinkers into two categories. The hedgehogs (men like Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche) are monists-they organize their universe into a central vision...
...Hedgehog and the Fox is one of eleven articles and lectures collected in Russian Thinkers, the first of four projected volumes of his selected writings. Although the subjects (Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bakunin, Belinsky, Herzen) were creatures of the 19th century, Berlin's acute intellect addresses one of the most difficult questions of the 20th: Are men so hungry for deterministic Utopias, for the comfort of all-encompassing systems, that they reject the insecurities of the fox's diverse world for the awful predictability of totalitarian structures...
...substance, that is quite old-masterly. The flesh is loose, but it is all structure too; and when the form beneath it slides away, obliterated by a wipe of the rag, Bacon can instantly tighten the image back with one detail - an eye, a patch of spiky hair like hedgehog quills. To a degree few other painters can rival, Bacon convinces you that every stroke and drip counts, that they carry a weight of ethical decision, so that representation is not a matter of filling-in but rather a continual reinvention of the motif. "I use everything from the brushes...
...infest European fiction. His name is Richard. He is a library archivist in charge of, yes, "fugitive and ephemeral materials." He is also the kind of man who will say, "Things are sometimes what they seem." But before the reader can begin to snarl or groan this incipient literary hedgehog changes into a devoted brother. His pretty sister Meg has just come home after twelve years in a mental hospital, and Richard seems pathetically ready to move heaven and earth to cajole her even one shuffling, painful step back toward the normal world...
...four or five crazy guys" who arranged this record are wags, activists, and any picky Harvard lame-brain who's worth his salt will go batty hunting puns. More than any other Firesign Theatre album, the Rat bristles like a hedgehog with mixed metaphors, malapropisms, and plays on words. Its running gag on cocaine is especially amusing. In short, The Giant Rat is diverting, if facile...