A Life of Journeys

Beyond Chatter

Making sense: the ‘antiphilosophical’ philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Attic Tarantino

The innovator Euripides puts the heedless Greek gods on the stage

Hard Power

Thucydides and the pursuit of domination through warfare

Reading Empson

William Empson’s reputation as a severely intellectual critic can be offputting for anyone coming to him for the first time, but it’s a misleading view.…

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…

Roads Both Taken

Novelist William Gibson likes to throw you into the narrative and semiotic deep end of two worlds in which history has bifurcated. Learning to navigate…

Tarantulas and Dynamite

Nietzsche’s reputation was tarnished for a long time by his posthumous adoption by Hitler. In fact the philosopher was repelled by antisemitism. It is now…

Alarms and Excursions

John Ruskin may be little known today, but his warnings about the effects of industrial pollution in the Victorian age still read well, while his…

Betrayal as an Act of Faith

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s rejection of Anglicanism to seek truth in the teachings of the Roman church shared many features with another ‘betrayal’ which happened seventy…

No Easy Answers

Wittgenstein’s talks in Cambridge in the 1930s were creative acts, works of art one might say, that came into existence in the process of their…

Gentrifying Hegel

It is quite astonishing that there is no reference to Slavoj Žižek in a massive new volume which calls itself a handbook to Hegel. While…

Reading the Revolution

A plethora of new books has appeared this year, accompanied by a number of exhibitions, in response to the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the…

Wrong Train, Right Station

William Blake placed Dante alongside the prophets of the Old Testament, Homer and Shakespeare as an embodiment of poetic genius and he worked studiously on…

Worlds in Words

Scholarly research into ‘dead’ languages evolved over many centuries into an intellectual discipline which was to become the backbone of universities' humanities departments. The history…

But I Live in Dublin

The Dublin Notebook, appearing as the seventh volume in OUP’s collected Hopkins, is an exemplary work of scholarship and from now any serious piece of…

Joy for the Disillusioned

At a time when the Bible’s importance is no longer at the centre of secular cultures, it is timely to consider the contribution of the…

Ulysses and Africa

A new book seeks to consider writers' responses to Homer from an anticolonial or postcolonialist perspective.

The Curator of Chiaroscuro

Sebastião Salgado’s latest book of photographs represents nature more as a New Age dream of harmony rather than the random mayhem and violent contingency it…

Hopkins’s Wound

Gerard Manley Hopkins was careless of the fate of his poems, treated his muse like a slut and her children as an unwanted and vaguely…