Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
All Together Now
Making a ‘national’ anthology of stories poses a problem: is there an essence that has to be captured? To be British in the 1920s was to believe that the national story had been progressive, from hut to glass tower, feudalism…
Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow
Many huge companies continue to ignore environmental and societal issues and carry on despoiling the planet and exploiting their workers in the name of profit maximisation. But such organisations – let us call them the ‘hairy bacon capitalists’ – are…
Getting it Straight
After a crisis of faith in the early 1890s Paul Valéry abandoned poetry for some decades. He didn’t stop writing, however, getting up at dawn each day to work on his notebooks, 250 of them eventually, occupying 27,000 pages. This…
The Right People
It is offensive to regard true democratic values as the exclusive possession of classic liberalism. But perhaps we should all audit the prejudices we derive from our own political tribe and orientation and ask what in them might be inessential…
Kindly, Modest and Loveable
The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, by Peter Mandler, Yale University Press, 360 pp, $35, ISBN: 978-300120523 The Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain: 1789-1837, by Ben Wilson, The Penguin Press, 464 pp, $27.95, ISBN: 978-1594201161 “What kind of people are the English? What…
Friendly! Dynamic! Various!
Saluting progress in Ireland and the contributions of artists to liberalisation is not the same kind of action as analysis or evaluation. Can critics, while retaining the idiom of ‘excellence’, find themselves merely ventriloquising the boosterism of marketing managers and…
Takes All Kinds
Herodotus was intensely interested in all forms of oddity or unfamiliarity, whether relating to human behaviour or geographical curiosity. Everything is a fish that comes into his net, yet he writes without any assumption of cultural superiority attaching to his…
Eternal Ephemera
A new study of evolution features a fascinating autobiographical voyage through the development of the author’s own ideas. Too often scientific teaching in the university relies too much on what are presumed to be facts. Yet many such “facts” turn…
Commodity Citizenship
Citizenship is an arbitrary status that to a large extent determines the material conditions of one’s future. More than class, gender or race, it is the most important factor affecting one’s life chances. Put crudely, some passports come with an…
Our Enemies’ Enemies
How the US and the Vatican combined to help Nazis escape justice
Portrait of Fox
Isaiah Berlin did not share the view that philosophy, and particularly practical philosophy, could be coherently pursued independently of history or, more specifically, of a certain historical self-awareness which springs from a knowledge and appreciation of the past.
Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang
His indisputable genius ensured that William Shakespeare assumed the status of England’s chief literary emblem, in the same way that Cervantes was chosen to represent Spain, Dante Italy or Molière France. But why was it that he seemed so uninterested…