Where to begin? After Boko Haram

Adewale Maja-Pearce, 26 April 2018

Whatever becomes of Boko Haram, a greater threat to stability in the country as a whole, not just the north, has begun to emerge: a group known to Nigerians as ‘Fulani herdsmen’.

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Does anyone have the right to sex?

Amia Srinivasan, 22 March 2018

When we see consent as the sole constraint on OK sex, we are pushed towards a naturalisation of sexual preference in which the rape fantasy becomes a primordial rather than a political fact.

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The Genesis of Blame

Anne Enright, 8 March 2018

Impossible to keep lust out of Eden, even though it had not been invented yet. In it comes, like a snake into the garden, because the reader is one of the fallen, and cannot imagine what it is to love...

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I am a knife: A Woman’s Agency

Jacqueline Rose, 22 February 2018

Reading the stories of sexual harassment both here and in the US, I have started to feel that all the attention has served not only to bolster the urgent call for a better world but, oddly and at the...

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Consider the Pangolin

Katherine Rundell, 22 February 2018

To reach​ the pangolin is difficult, which feels only reasonable; something so remarkable shouldn’t be gained with ease. She lives in a wildlife conservation project outside Harare, near...

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Simon Schama​ is devoting a trilogy to the 3000-year-long ‘Story of the Jews’. His attention, however, is not evenly distributed. The first volume, The Story of the Jews: Finding...

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The story reveals the extent to which British society in the 1920s clung to certain beliefs about women and language. One of these prejudices, fiercely held, was that a ‘respectable’ woman was incapable...

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Short Cuts: Environmental Law

Frederick Wilmot-Smith, 8 February 2018

The problem isn’t the laws as such, but their enforcement. The EU’s limit for nitrogen dioxide is 40 micrograms per cubic metre of air. In 2016, levels in Oxford Street averaged more than twice that...

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The ‘New Anti-Semitism’

Neve Gordon, 4 January 2018

Not long​ after the eruption of the Second Intifada in September 2000, I became active in a Jewish-Palestinian political movement called Ta’ayush, which conducts non-violent direct action...

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What Is Great about Ourselves: Closing Time

Pankaj Mishra, 21 September 2017

It remains to be seen whether America, Britain, Europe and liberalism can be made great again. But it already seems clear that the racial supremacist in the White House and many of his opponents are engaged...

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In Her Philosopher’s Cloak: Hypatia

Barbara Graziosi, 17 August 2017

‘On a​ fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the reader, and a...

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Diary: Santería

Fiona Pitt-Kethley, 27 July 2017

Early​ this year I had my first and only encounter with Santería. It was at the beach. I had long been an enthusiast for cold water swimming. I liked it even when I lived in Hastings, but...

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Defining Anti-Semitism

Stephen Sedley, 4 May 2017

Shorn​ of philosophical and political refinements, anti-Semitism is hostility towards Jews as Jews. Where it manifests itself in discriminatory acts or inflammatory speech it is generally...

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One of the great paradoxes of the Obama era is that it encouraged so many liberals, both black and white, to see the black experience in America not as a slow, arduous struggle for freedom culminating...

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Short Cuts: Family Migration

Frances Webber, 30 March 2017

In October​ 2010, five months after the coalition government took power, and Theresa May became home secretary, a requirement was brought in for spouses seeking to join their (British or...

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Horrible Heresies: Spinoza’s Big Idea

Jonathan Rée, 16 March 2017

Baruch Spinoza​ was fascinated by human follies, and in the Ethica he set out to examine them dispassionately. ‘These turmoils move me neither to laughter nor even to tears,’ he...

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When​ the government decided to appeal to the Supreme Court against the High Court’s ruling that ministers could not lawfully use the royal prerogative to leave the EU, many lawyers,...

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Short Cuts: Anonymity

Stephen Sedley, 19 January 2017

The​ Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore recently outed (or claimed to be outing) the writer of the Neapolitan novels concealed behind the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. Has the press – or anyone...

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