Poetry and Politics
Poets, more than any other kind of writers or artists, are called upon to defend their impulses and pretensions. This is particularly true in times in political crisis which we are living through right now.
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When is bullshit real bullshit?
It may be comforting to assert that one’s political enemies are bullshitters but one can’t help wondering whether this assertion is itself a piece of bullshit.
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Rereadings 1 – ‘On The Closing of the American Mind’
Welcome to a new series called ‘Rereadings’ in which writers are invited to consider a notable work of their own or of another author. Our first instalment features the reflections of Richard Kraut on Allan Bloom’s ‘The Closing of the…
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It’s all ‘Mesearch’
My sister-in-law has been a lifelong fan of Sean Combs (Puff Daddy as was – Diddy if you will). In March 2024, the redoubtable icon of hip hop found himself, not for the first time, at the receiving end of some unwanted criminal justice attention. The scrolling public watched as searches were carried out in…
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The Thing with Rivers
Is a River Alive?, by Robert Macfarlane. Hamish Hamilton, 374 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0241624814 Incubating the Trout. The Story of the Oldest Salmonid Hatchery in the World and the Environmental Fight to Protect It, by Kevin Prunty, Book Hub Publishing, 72 pp, €12, ISBN: 978-1068649073 Like Bedřik Smetana’s symphonic poem The Moldau, this book opens…
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A ‘Sublime’ Friendship
Richard Wollheim I don’t expect to agree with, but then he doesn’t expect to agree with me. We are on very good terms, but then again he is rather a maverick. He also doesn’t have very many allies. He is very much a man on his own. Isaiah Berlin They were indeed potentially quite incompatible….
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A Crack in the Cosmos
Some time around the year 466 BCE – in the second year of the 78th Olympiad, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder tells us – a massive meteor blazed across the sky in broad daylight, crashing to the earth with an enormous explosion near the small Greek town of Aegospotami, or ‘Goat Rivers’, on the…
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Talkin’ about a Revolution
Hegel’s World Revolutions, by Richard Bourke, Princeton University Press, 344 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0691250182 Is human history ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ or rather a heroic story of the inevitable unfolding of human progress? Apart from professional optimists like Steven Pinker, most of us might feel on…
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Am I an illusion?
Every day we hear the use of the vocabulary of the ‘ego’ or ‘self’ without investigating what is meant by the term. For example, we might enjoy the compliment ‘love yourself’. Or we may well undergo embarrassment if a friend says ‘take responsibility for yourself’. Sometimes it is said by way of affront, ‘don’t take…
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Saving the Enlightenment
Like it or not we are stuck with the Enlightenment. That much spoken of phenomenon and reactions to it comprise the greater part of our active political and intellectual heritage. Personally, I never much cared for the term. It has a grandiose and born-again evangelical tone, which strikes me as excessively self-important and fundamentally ahistorical….
