St Francis wrote poetry, tamed a wolf, received the stigmata on a mountainside, and if you love a kitsch Nativity figurine, you have St Francis to thank. He was a poor scribe and a worse artist, but great...
Both sides of Edward Coke’s reputation have endured. Not long ago the benchers of the Inner Temple refused to name a new building after him because of his brutal prosecution of Walter Raleigh. Yet Coke’s...
The unionist fondness for Union Jacks does not preclude violent resistance to the British state when its policy conflicts with the interests of Protestant Ulster. Under the auspices of the Ulster Covenant...
The question that motivates Matthew McNaught’s Immanuel is simple, but hard to answer. What prompted these white, Middle England Christians to leave their homes and families to join a church, the central...
Most of us would find it horrible to be told that we aren’t worth engaging with, that our views are socially unacceptable or merely a function of demography. But that it is painful to be on the receiving...
Research into intellectual auxiliaries has thrived in recent years. Translators, interpreters, secretaries and amanuenses are no longer considered intermediaries, but contributors in their own right. Martin...
‘Thirty years had passed since I last interviewed Sharon Henderson. In 1992 I was sent to her flat on the Wear Garth estate in Sunderland after her seven-year-old daughter, Nikki, was murdered. The following...
Epictetus presents a version of Stoicism that often aligns with traditional Roman social norms, even if his expression of those ideals is often wonderfully vigorous. ‘I’ll cut off your head,’ a tyrant...
Many white Southerners adopted their own equation of the era of the civil rights movement with Reconstruction, warning that federal civil rights legislation violated local freedom. Despite the courage...
Derek Parfit’s approach isn’t designed to get us to appreciate the mysterious, awe-inspiring significance of procreation and death in human life; it is simply the springboard for a new puzzle in moral...
A general rule about rules is that one rule breeds another rule developed to catch an exception to the first rule, and so (potentially) ad infinitum, until there are so many darn rules that nobody can...
What’s so impressive about Anaximander is that he was willing to ‘redesign the universe’ – to hypothesise an extra hemisphere of reality – on the basis of evidence that would have been easy to...
Other people aren’t hell, Lauren Berlant writes, just bothersome, ‘which is to say that they have to be dealt with’. Why is it so hard to live with other people? And why do we seek to ease the friction...
The populists had emerged out of the nihilist milieu as its most committed revolutionaries, embracing an austere code of ethics. Like Kropotkin, they were motivated by modern science rather than Hegelian...
It’s difficult to argue that something is valuable in itself. But I’m not alone in finding the questions of pure philosophy both maddening and mesmerising.
It would be naive to ignore the vulnerability of an organic constitution such as the UK’s to capture or erosion from within, when government contempt for both constitutional propriety and legality is...
Why is there no ‘natural rate’ of profit, poverty or inequality beyond which we shouldn’t go? To say that economics is political isn’t to say it is conniving or ill-willed, but merely that, like...
Philosophers of science had long accepted their role in justifying science, making the case that scientific knowledge is – take your pick – true, objective, rational, reliable, progressive, powerful....