Down Among the Dead Men
You cannot understand an old city if you are not tuned to the cacophony of tenancy claims that greet you in stairwells as you trudge up to a fifth-floor flat. You are dead inside if you do not heed the…
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Curation Once Again
The current vogue for the term curation arose in tandem with the conceptual art movement, where the idea or concept of art took precedence over the traditional aesthetic, but accelerated in the 1990s when the boundaries between big art, big…
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Lord of the Flies
Jerry Coyne’s shouty polemic against religion, and against the possibility of any accommodation between science and religious belief, is largely an attack on creationism and ‘ìntelligent design’. It is hard to see it being taken seriously anywhere but in the…
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Post-Punk Polymath
It is no surprise that such an outstanding lyricist as Elvis Costello should be able to deliver such an engaging autobiography. And for a man who used to punch out an album with a free EP, plus a brace of…
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If You Liked This …
The eminent Milanese writer and publisher Roberto Calasso, chairman of Adelphi Edizioni, has an unusual recipe for commercial success: publish only books that you think are of the highest quality, and become known for publishing only books of the highest…
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Really, I’m Stuffed
The drive for material goods may well be too deeply entrenched in human beings to be eliminated but perhaps a consciousness that we now have material prosperity beyond our spiritual competence to deal with could lead to more considered patterns…
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Truculent Priest
In a series of radical critiques published in the 1970s Ivan Illich questioned educational practice, managerialism and the medical profession. Though he could be arrogant, inconsistent and even plain silly, Illich had important things to say about modernity.
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An End to Smiting
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues that it is in a literal interpretation of ‘holy books’ that fundamentalism thrives. He calls for the training of a generation of religious leaders and educators who embrace the world in its diversity and sacred texts…
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A Massacre of Art?
A stimulating new study, focusing on one painting and its contemporary critical reception, illuminates the French painter Eugène Delacroix, a man who, ‘reactionary in his ideas, romantic in his talent’, was, according to Victor Hugo, in contradiction with his own…
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The Rolling English Road
Jim Phelan, born in the last decade of the nineteenth century in Inchicore in Dublin, was condemned to death for murder, served a long sentence in various prisons and on his release became a tramp, a novelist and a writer…