A Very Active Captain: Henricentrism

Patrick Collinson, 22 June 2006

Henry VIII is the most immediately recognisable of all English monarchs, present company excepted. He has been declared a national icon, and we are told that he vies with Adolf Hitler for the...

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Against Solitude: Karl Jaspers

Martin Jay, 8 June 2006

Who now still reads Karl Jaspers? Compared to the other still influential giants of 20th-century German philosophy – Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Habermas, Arendt, Cassirer and...

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There are some who will have taken a sadistic pleasure in the failure of the recent attempt by the News of the World’s undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood, the ‘fake sheikh’, to...

Read more about Towards a Right to Privacy: What to do with a prurient press?

Shady: Voltaire’s Loneliness

Colin Jones, 25 May 2006

The life of François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a. Voltaire (1694-1778), could hardly have been as colourful as that of the eponymous hero of his most famous novella, Candide. In his brief but...

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One can believe in moral progress without accusing past ages of wickedness or stupidity (though there is plenty of both in all ages). Perhaps progress can occur only through a series of historical stages,...

Read more about The View from Here and Now: A Tribute to Bernard Williams

Printed in 1958, the Bible given to me as a child was illustrated with photographs of the Holy Land. I was particularly taken with the ‘Native House near Bethlehem’. A woman broods...

Read more about Land of Pure Delight: Anglicising the Holy Land

Once I rebuked for bad taste a friend who described Savonarola, at his execution, as ‘serving as the pièce de résistance of a public bonfire’. Actually his taste was...

Read more about Not the man for it: The Death of Girolamo Savonarola

The Israel Lobby: the Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, 23 March 2006

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering...

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‘We’ve been trying to get you to come and talk here for the last three years,’ my host complained as we shook hands at the airport. ‘Here’ was Tripoli, capital of...

Read more about Diary: Libya during the Cartoon Controversy

The government of Securitania deports some supposed enemies of the people and puts others under house arrest; public scrutiny of these measures in the ordinary courts is denied. Disruptive people...

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Cyber-Jihad: What Osama Said

Charles Glass, 9 March 2006

When I was five years old, the first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, threatened to bury me. That was in 1956, when he buried the Hungarian Revolution. In California we...

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Short Cuts: the benefits of self-censorship

Jeremy Harding, 23 February 2006

The row over the cartoons of the Prophet has pitted freedom of speech against the concept of blasphemy and looks at first sight like a head-on clash of secular and religious traditions. This is...

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Diary: The death of General Mowhoush

Marc Kusnetz, 23 February 2006

On 10 November 2003 an Iraqi major-general called Abed Hamed Mowhoush presented himself at the gate of Forward Operating Base Tiger, a small US facility in the western province of al Anbar, near...

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In the beginning was not the word, or the deed, but the face. ‘Darkness was upon the face of the deep,’ runs the King James Version in the second verse of the opening of Genesis....

Read more about At the tent flap sin crouches: The Fleshpots of Egypt

Suppose 2005 had fulfilled President Bush’s fondest hopes. His intervention in Iraq was now successfully winding down, to reveal the first vibrant democracy in the Islamic world –...

Read more about The Stealth Revolution, Continued: Samuel Alito and the Supreme Court

Like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem has captured the public imagination, supposedly demonstrating that there are absolute limits to what can...

Read more about Provenly Unprovable: Can mathematics describe the world?

‘They fell upon their own knees, and then upon the Aborigines.’ The old quip about the Puritans who settled colonial New England offers a succinct and not inaccurate summary of...

Read more about Purchase and/or Conquest: Were the Indians robbed?

Room for the Lambs: sexual equality

Elizabeth Spelman, 26 January 2006

The official US publication date of this portfolio of Catharine MacKinnon’s articles and speeches over the past twenty-five years coincided with the release of Inside Deep Throat, a...

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