Hypocrisy is such a ubiquitous feature of democratic politics that it can be hard to take it seriously. Indeed, taking it seriously is sometimes held to be a sign of political immaturity, or...
This book changed my sense of the big story of Soviet history as well as the big story of the Jews in the modern world.* Chapter 4, in particular, the interpretative history of Jews in the Soviet...
Alongside cutting crime, hospital waiting-lists and taxes, cutting the number of asylum seekers can be depended on to rank high among pre-election promises. This year, the Tories’ cap on...
The government’s reluctance to allow intercept evidence to be used in court to procure the conviction of terrorist suspects seems mysterious and self-defeating: why deny yourself such a key...
Ever since Mary Douglas’s anthropological foray into the laws of impurity in Leviticus in Purity and Danger (1966), her work on the Bible has been constantly stimulating and, at its best,...
The American Constitution is the oldest in the world, but appearances are deceiving. Over the past two centuries, the Supreme Court has given very different meanings to the grand abstractions and...
What is Gladstone trying to tell us? Through the matted undergrowth of his prose, with its vatic pronouncements, its interminable subordinate clauses, its ponderous hesitations and protestations,...
Five years ago Régis Debray published an article in Le Monde diplomatique entitled ‘What Is Mediology?’ His aim was to open up a notion he’d introduced in passing twenty...
The hero of this genial and highly accessible book – first of a projected quartet – is Aristotle. What prompts Anthony Kenny’s admiration above all is evidence for the first...
Where does it stop? The events at Abu Ghraib prison show no signs of vanishing into historical inertia. On the contrary, they seem to be replicating themselves throughout the defenceless body...
There’s a sexist joke, popular among theologians, in which God, a woman, is in the act of creating the world: ‘And darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God said “Let...
When I finished this book I was left wondering why H.L.A. Hart hadn’t destroyed his diaries before he died. Perhaps modesty made him think that no one would want to write about him –...
‘I had hoped my department would hire somebody in the history of philosophy,’ my friend lamented, ‘but my colleagues decided that we needed somebody who was contributing to the...
Angels aren’t what they used to be. According to St Luke’s Gospel, the shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night (currently being portrayed by small children wearing tea...
In April, days before the Abu Ghraib story broke, the Supreme Court was hearing Rasul v. Bush, the case of a British citizen captured in Afghanistan and held at the US naval base at Guantanamo...
Dictatorship and renovation may both be precipitated by crisis, but whereas the former is to be deployed as sparingly as possible, the latter is to be encouraged, for institutions last longer if they retain...
I don’t believe in astrology, but I also know that not believing in astrology is a typically Taurean trait. When I first caught a bright young friend browsing in the astrology section of a...
‘How do you finally respond to your life and your name?’ Derrida raised this question in his final interview with Le Monde, published on 18 August this year. If he could apprehend his...