Reinventing the Renaissance
This high-spirited and highly personal approach to writing about the Renaissance is anything but ‘academic’.
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Is Hope a Virtue?
Is it time we entertained doubts about hope’s persistent allure?
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Messy versus Tidy
The shadow of Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith hangs over two contemporary efforts to explain what makes nations wealthy and what makes empires decline.
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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…
