The surprises inherent in poetry serve the important function of unsettling us, of luring us into what Rilke spoke of as ‘the open’. They might even succeed in confounding our certainties, and thus widening our capacities of perception and experience.
The greatest Jewish crime, for early modern Christians, was the rejection and killing of Christ. But they also had a long list of other faults they found, from physical marks, ugliness and proneness to illness to moral failings such as…
Don De Lillo seems to suggest in his new novel that literature has failed us, failed to correct the inadequacy of language or interrupt the downward curve of history. Yet that implication is denied by the work, not just by…
As a Jesuit novice, Gerard Manley Hopkins once enclosed a feather in a letter to his mother, noting that ‘no one is ever so poor that he is not … owner of the skies and stars and everything wild that…
Martin Luther believed the papacy to be one of the great human agencies through which Satan operated on earth. This goes a long way to explaining the virulence of his polemic against the Catholic church, which still has the power…
The philosopher Slavoj Žižek challenges what he sees as a facile left-liberal consensus, asking how many immigrants from Islamic countries really want to be integrated into the norms and practices of Western societies. What if the obstacle to integration is…
The publication of Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set A Watchman’ upset many fans of ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’. Nevertheless it may well present a more accurate picture of what is actually involved in practising law and of the conflict between purely…
Francesco Petrarcha bequeathed to the Renaissance a particular way of writing about love. Shakespeare’s Romeo is just one of his disciples. But love was not the only string to Petrarch’s bow; he was also an archaeologist, classical scholar and respected…
A new biography of Marcel Proust which appears as part of a series called ‘Jewish Lives’ fails to tell us very much about its subject and does not seem to be on safe ground either with the linguistic, historical or…
Dmitri Shostakovich achieved success and fame as a composer early in life, and that may have made him particularly vulnerable. He had been one of the most prominent artists in Russia all through the worst years of Stalin’s rule. The…