AND now for something completely different: A Cultural History of Causality (Princeton University Press, £18.95/$29.95). This could be titled “A history of motivation” – in the sense of an actor asking “what is my motivation for this?” Stephen Kern, professor of history at Ohio State University, investigates this query through treatments of murderers in Victorian and modern fictions, set against the changing scientific and psychological understandings that informed these.
We get thumbnail sketches of novels and of the history of statistics and of serotonin’s role as a neurotransmitter. Kern pays surprisingly little attention to syphilis, to schizophrenia or to Satan…
