Writing about thinking up other worlds by Glen Newey, Terry Eagleton, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Susan Pedersen, David Trotter and Anthony Pagden.
With the proscription of Palestine Action early in July, the question of what support for a terrorist group means has become urgent. Very few people in Britain supported al-Qaida; many more support the disabling of factories that supply arms for use in Gaza.
For several years, I have been following the case of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon, the couple who went on the run from social services and the police in January 2023, in order to prevent their baby . . .
It is now a criminal offence, under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000, to express support for Palestine Action, a direct-action group formed in 2020 with the aim of disrupting the British factories . . .
Francis assumed the papacy in 2013 in the teeth of a crisis. His predecessor, Benedict XVI, the first pope in centuries to resign, was strongly associated with theological and ritual conservatism. His . . .
In the weeks since his inauguration, Donald Trump has issued a series of executive orders intended to undermine progressive law and, in some cases, the foundations of constitutional democracy itself . . .
The invitation said ‘black dress for Ladies’. ‘You’re not allowed to be whiter than him,’ my husband, Jason, instructs. ‘He has to be the whitest. And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.’
Pistorius was surely not aware that when he insisted the person he shot in the bathroom was an intruder he was re-enacting one strand of his nation’s cruellest past.
In June 1946 Simone de Beauvoir was 38. She had just finished The Ethics of Ambiguity, and was wondering what to write next. Urged by Jean Genet, she went to see the Lady and the Unicorn...
If there’s anything we philosophers really hate it’s an untenable dualism. Exposing untenable dualisms is a lot of what we do for a living. It’s no small job, I assure you. They...
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology....
Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-semitic in...
Forget Bob Geldof, Bono and the other do-gooders, Genoa’s only significance was as the latest battle in the war of Neoliberalism. It was a clear victory this time for the...
It might have been true that nothing ever existed: no living beings, no stars, no atoms, not even space or time. When we think about this possibility, it can seem astonishing that anything exists.
It was nice to be awoken on 12 November by the BBC informing us that the Queen’s Speech would announce measures ‘to strengthen the jury system’. It is, after all, a very ancient...
Writing about thinking up other worlds by Glen Newey, Terry Eagleton, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Susan Pedersen, David Trotter and Anthony Pagden.
Writing about anarchism in the LRB archive by Steve Fraser, Susan Watkins, T.J. Clark, Zoë Heller, Hal Foster, Wes Enzinna and Jessica Olin.
Slavoj Žižek responds to criticisms of his piece for the LRB, ‘Resistance is Surrender’, and presents his views on violence.
Frances Stonor Saunders inspects the complex apparatus of today’s border regimes and their obsession with the verified self.
David talks to writer and philosopher John Gray about pretty much everything, from the Corbyn cult to the craziness of cryogenics.
Philosopher Jonathan Rée unravels the story within Spinoza's knotty work of 17th century rationalism, the Ethics
When I told people I was going to Guantánamo Bay last September to observe the trial of the 9/11 hijackers, I was met with bemusement. Even the lawyers I spoke to seemed surprised that there were still...
Marx meant Capital to read as if it were a pedagogical exercise in dispelling illusion, penetrating the veil that bourgeois economists had draped over a system that depends on the exploitation of labour...
On the horizon is a legally unfettered behemoth capable of coercing organisations, negating rights, suppressing speech and reshaping the economy and society of the United States – all at the whim of...
In the summer of 1860, an unprecedented wave of sectarian violence swept across Greater Syria. The massacre has long been studied but its causes remain misunderstood. Muslims, Jews and Christians of...
Christ himself made barely any pronouncements condemning sexuality. This has not stood in the way of Church authorities' lavish condemnation of all sorts of human desire.
From frescoes and printed devotional images to incised amulets, moulded gingerbread and the stamped Eucharistic host, a wide variety of images has, at various moments in Western history, seemed worthy...
Gisèle Pelicot doesn’t conceive of her now ex-husband or the other men who raped her as ‘bad apples’, aberrations from the norm, but as products of what she has called a ‘macho and patriarchal...
Love’s Work is the ‘existential drama’ of a postwar Jewish British woman philosopher, born in London in 1947, who reads books, sits in meetings, falls in love, falls ill, faces death. But it also...
At some point Americans are going to have to confront a painful truth: they can no longer rely on the constitutional machinery devised by the nation’s late 18th-century founders. Muddling through this...
The plan to ‘off-shore’ asylum seekers to Rwanda was the last straw. In May 2023, I resigned as a (part-time) immigration judge after twenty years in the job. It was less a matter of conscience, more...
William James was acutely sensitive to both his own disabling pain and the wriggling ironies of his super-subtle family, who complicated any ideas he might profess about healthful and happy lives. In the...
‘He draws his rents from rage and pain,’ Emerson once wrote of ‘the writer’, but more narrowly of himself.
In its first three centuries Reichenau Abbey was one of the leading educational centres in Europe. Its abbots produced fine manuscripts for their own use and on commission. They were involved in Carolingian...
Fanon’s world has a logic. His pages are full of identities, contradictions, Aufhebungen – master and slave, being and nothingness. Any biography, however, has to decide in the end which of the various...
At the trial in March of Michael Sparks, the first rioter to enter the Capitol illegally, the defence attorney argued that his client had merely been following orders: ‘He was there to do what his president...
Mediation is not a solution that seeks to resolve cases justly according to law; it tries to get parties to negotiate a compromise. As Hazel Genn put it, the outcome of mediation ‘is not about just settlement,...
Genesis, which narrates moral failure, theft, murder, rape, unremedied injustice and sorrow, is a strange place to find serenity. Its silences demand interpretation. ‘Few and evil have been the days...
Gaslighting is a helpful way of explaining what is happening when Donald Trump gives fake-news briefings and refuses to be held accountable for his actions while claiming – or allowing others to claim...
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