Despite his exotic name, Felipe Fernández-Armesto is an upper-class Englishman of the kind who seem to float on a cloud of contentment, perpetually entertained by the oafish antics of the...
Proust’s Swann is obsessed by what he doesn’t know about Odette. His anguish has no remedy; finding out more only adds to what he does know about her. Since Kant, lots of philosophers...
Last month saw the massacre of two hundred innocents in the Algiers suburb of Bentalha, but British newspaper headlines were taken up with more exotic matters: the sentences facing two British...
Cubans like to say that their impoverished country is a land of miracles. How many people can pack onto a bus? Only God knows. The same irony was there on the road to the Church of St Lazarus at...
Ernst Mayr is one of the century’s pre-eminent Darwinian evolutionists, who, in the past two decades, has published a magisterial history of biology and many seminal philosophical essays....
The week before Princess Diana’s funeral and the funeral itself were, by agreement, a remarkable moment in the history of modern Britain, but most of us, despite broadsheet press commentary...
As political theorist, Maurice Cranston had little to add to the conventional wisdom, but he possessed an astonishing, if strangely low-key, talent as a biographer. His biography of Locke,...
If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, it follows that the enemy of Michael Howard is my hero. So awful was Howard’s long reign at the Home Office that many liberals sought democratic...
If homosexuals are what they are because of birth or through early environment, and are not in themselves deliberately vicious men, they should not be punished. To punish in such circumstances...
In the years before 1914, the open lectures that Henri Bergson gave at the Collège de France were the prototype in intellectual chic for the barnstorming Parisian ‘seminars’ of...
Edmund Burke is easily the most significant intellectual in politics these islands ever produced. Infinitely more profound and productive than his nearest 18th-century equivalent, Henry St John,...
The eighth wonder of the world was closed. The attendant told us that this was due to the theft of a sacred artefact from one of the churches. ‘By a tourist,’ he said with feeling. We...
The basic life chances of human beings vary dramatically around the world. According to the 1996 Report of the United Nations Development Programme, the life expectancy of a child born today in...
The idea of social construction is wonderfully liberating. It reminds us, for example, that motherhood and its meanings are not the fixed and inevitable consequence of child-bearing and rearing,...
In future times people will look back on the death penalty as a piece of barbarity just as we now look back on torture.’ These confident words were spoken by a member of the 1848 Frankfurt...
Among the less visible casualties of the recent Aitken libel case was the possibility of improving the quality of discussion about Saudi Arabia, an anomalous state with which, whatever a...
Many working-class kids who grew up in Manhattan in the Forties, as I did, played a nasty game that went like this. With your pals watching from a distance, you waited on the sidewalk for an...
In the spring of 1604, the English were adjusting to the arrival of King James from Scotland, attending to the doings of his first Parliament, and awaiting the arrival of envoys from the King of...