As a colleague of David Simpson at the University of California and a friend graciously thanked in his acknowledgments, can I pretend to have the disinterestedness necessary to write an objective...
‘Objectivity’ is a word at once indispensable and elusive. It can be metaphysical, methodological and moral by turns, occasionally in the same paragraph. Sometimes it refers to the...
On 18 May 1593 a warrant was issued to ‘apprehend’ Christopher Marlowe, and on 20 May he was brought before the Privy Council for questioning. He was not detained, but was ordered to...
‘Spinozist’ used to be what ‘Postmodernist’ is now, the worst thing one intellectual could call another. For reasons explained in Jonathan Israel’s fascinating The...
In your average bookstore, the volumes stacked by the dozen and sold under the heading of Self-Help are liable to be found quartered in the same part of the building as those falling under the...
‘Lack of a historical sense is the hereditary defect of philosophers . . . So what is needed from now on is historical philosophising, and with it the virtue of modesty.’...
This David Gentleman cover for an election issue of the ‘LRB’ in 1987 shows a Britain ‘muted’ by the ‘secretive and repressive Mrs Thatcher’. Fifteen years...
What was it that Samuel Johnson said about Laurence Sterne’s unusual novel? ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’ I wonder whether the Doctor would have said...
One of the most tangential, and consequently least horrible, contingencies of the Soham murders is the decision by the parents of an 11-year-old girl to have a microchip implanted in their...
The United Kingdom is a good place in which to assemble a book of sceptical essays about human rights, but was 2001 a good year in which to do it? True, by then Scotland and Wales had operative...
In 1974 Robert Nozick shattered the political complacency of the philosophical establishment when he published Anarchy, State and Utopia, a book arguing that justice had nothing to do with...
A note to Royall Tyler’s elegant new translation of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji explains that ‘Hahakigi (“;broom tree”) is a plant from which brooms were...
Primo Levi is among the most read and most resonant witnesses to the greatest human disaster of a disastrous age. He created more powerful images, more mind-sustaining turns of phrase through...
Two-thirds of the way through this dense, involved and exhausting book, its author acknowledges that his views about the nature of persons have the following implication. Suppose that a woman,...
Cleaning staff intimidate him. In Madrid he’s too shy to enter a restaurant, and in Barbados he worries about the price of lunch. Leaving a ‘gathering’ in London he feels ‘envious and worried’;...
Julia Kristeva was in Manchester in March to give a lecture. One of the pleasures of her visit, for me, the day after the lecture and en route to the Manchester United superstore, was to...
In 1989, an earthquake in Tipasa, just west of Algiers, left thousands of people homeless. Three years later, another shook the densely packed outskirts of Cairo. In both cases, the state’s...
From the outside, –– magistrates’ court looks like a leisure centre. It is built from big blocks of yellow stone and its metal window frames are painted a garish red. There is a...