Holding Quicksilver
Bernard Williams showed that analytic philosophy could be insightful and engaging as well as precise and rigorous.
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Make the Gruel Thick and Slab
A new, engaging study of Shakespeare’s tragedies opens up deeper, more general questions as well as a way of thinking better and farther about the complex matter of living.
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The Rise of Eng Lit.
A monumental treatment of the rise of English literature as a university discipline in Britain from the 1860s to the 1960s.
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Anatomy of Envy
Playing with envy is like playing with fire. It just isn’t worth it and should come with a mental health warning.
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Isaiah Berlin’s Legacy
What’s alive and what’s dead in the thought of Isaiah Berlin? A new book argues there is plenty of mileage left in the arch fox.
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Mass Manipulation
Though manipulation is as old as Adam and Eve and the serpent, it has taken on a new salience in our time. Social media has democratised manipulation, putting techniques of persuasion and deception, once monopolised by large corporations and states,…
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Tyranny of Choice
In recent decades, Ireland has experienced a profound transformation from a society shaped by religious and communal authority towards one defined by individual autonomy. Sophia Rosenfeld’s book serves as an excellent catalyst for rethinking this paradigm.
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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.
