I have to confess that before starting on this review I hadn’t read Robert Brandom’s massive Making It Explicit (1994). Although it’s famous, very few of my colleagues have read...
In 1987, three years before Gender Trouble made her the most famous feminist philosopher in the United States, Judith Butler published a book on Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage...
For the past four years, a debate has raged in Australia over whether the process of reconciliation between its indigenous and non-indigenous populations should include a formal apology for past...
For most of its history the United States has been within the mainstream of Western enlightened thought and practice with respect to the death penalty. Sometimes ahead of the curve: Michigan...
I am an American who thinks of himself (interchangeably, with increasing degrees of specificity) as an Eastern European Jew, an Ashkenazi and a Litvak, but this self-identification, I have to...
What all men know – that Hitler wanted, intended and tried to annihilate the Jews of Europe – was something largely hidden from the Jews themselves until the job was far along. Hitler...
We might well think of 2000 as the year of emotional justice. In Private Eye last month a cartoon of a suited man being chased by a group of youths bore the caption: ‘I’m a...
Once liberalism’s signature virtue, toleration has of late been superseded by other more fashionable ideals. Foremost among these is ‘sensitivity’, before which there was...
According to the English statute of treasons drawn up in 1351, it was an offence to ‘compass or imagine the death of our lord the king’. The meaning of these strange words was already...
In September 1978, on a night train from Milan, I was forced to have sex with an architect on his way to the site of a biscuit factory he was designing somewhere outside Naples (or so he...
Suppose that 16 years ago you had written not one but two superlative books. Would you suffer from anxiety of influence with regard to early versions of yourself, as if, to twist Harold Bloom,...
Both David Cressy and Cynthia Herrup believe they are writing microhistory, a word coined by Italians, but used to describe above all the work of Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre,...
Hilary Putnam’s latest book collects two series of his lectures with two chapters of ‘afterwords’. Subsidiary topics go by faster than my eye was able to follow, but the main...
Denis Diderot, the hero of Malcolm Bradbury’s new novel, has one niche in the English language with ‘esprit de l’escalier’, his only entry in the Oxford Dictionary of...
Caleb held a bundle of arrows in his left hand and a bow and single arrow in his right. His mother was holding her torn ears between her thumbs and forefingers. Her chin was on her bare chest....
Three scenes from London life. 1) Westminster in 1999, when the tidal wave of ‘bogus asylum seekers’ that would break across tabloid front pages was just a gentle swell on the...
Our century has been distrustful of beauty. Our philosophy follows Kant, who found beauty only in a contemplation of nature and art which yields an ‘entirely disinterested...
By Book 9 of the Iliad the Greeks are terrified. The Trojans are on the march; their fires are visible at night. The enemy strength seems overwhelming. Agamemnon has treated Achilles shabbily, taking back...