When I was a boy – on this evidence, a miserable, maudlin sort of child – I used to kill time by calculating the value of a human life. Not the value of your soul or your contribution...
Last year, my father-in-law died. He was a complicated, difficult, intelligent man; the obituary-ese would be ‘colourful’. On occasion, when he was alive, I wanted him to go to hell....
The tumult that followed the Iranian presidential election of June 2009 revealed to an inattentive world an Iranian public that bore little resemblance to its idiosyncratic and touchy rulers. It...
It felt like the finale of Fidelio, a crowd of prisoners staggering into the sunlight, free at last, their voices rising triumphantly in ‘Hail to the Day’. We were in a conference...
Why does the United States alone among Western countries retain the death penalty? Long after all of Europe and much of the rest of the modern world abolished it, recognising that it violates...
In the late 1990s it seemed quite possible that Indonesia was going to disintegrate, to become a South-East Asian version of Pakistan or Nigeria. The collapse of the long-lasting dictatorship of...
The very question of where Kafka belongs is already something of a scandal given the fact that the writing charts the vicissitudes of non-belonging, or of belonging too much. Remember: he broke every engagement...
Scott Atran’s book about jihad and the wilder fringes of Islam is ambitious, noisy, scuffed at the edges. The Maghreb, Palestine, Syria, Kashmir, Indonesia: Atran has been there, brought...
The Russians have a saying: ‘The past is unpredictable.’ So it has proved for Gerrard Winstanley. For all but one of his 67 years he lived in obscurity and then he died forgotten....
San Nicandro Garganico is a modest agrarian township of some 16,000 inhabitants on the edge of the spur of the boot-shaped Italian peninsula. It has been somewhat bypassed by Italy’s...
The quatercentenary commemorative King James Bible (KJB) sits on my desk as I write: a satisfying artefact in its chocolate livery enriched by opulently gilded top, tail and fore edges, with...
Mumtaz Hussain Qadri smiled as he surrendered to his colleagues after shooting Salman Taseer, the governor of the Punjab, dead. Many in Pakistan seemed to support his actions; others wondered how...
It’s striking nowadays to hear a philosopher say that ‘we want a unified account of our knowledge’; even more striking to hear him say ‘I think we can get it’; very...
Few people in this country, I would guess, reading this headnote to the official report of a recent decision of the US Supreme Court, would regard it as a difficult case: After a West Virginia...
Slobodan Milosevic died in March 2006, a few months before his trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague would have ended. The trial, at which...
Like many professional subversives, Deleuze and Guattari worked well in institutions.
Thomas Mann wrote this engaging novella in a few weeks in 1943. (The new translation by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, which is brisk and direct, is a welcome replacement of the fussier and...
The world is a complex place. That is a truism, but perhaps complexity can be investigated rather than taken for granted. Think of the sorts of causal interaction one might regard as...