A memorable image in Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities likens the impact of a certain character to that of a powdery avalanche. The effect of reading Marina Warner’s magisterial...
A few years ago, Stephen O’Rahilly, a professor of metabolic medicine at Cambridge and consultant of last resort for the dangerously overweight, had two cousins from the Punjab referred to...
Brought up Jewish and soccer-loving in the Netherlands, Simon Kuper has come to realise that he accepted too easily the myth of Dutch wartime heroism. The result is a long litany of hurt...
The first recorded use of the word ‘freedom’ in English comes in the penultimate chapter of Alfred the Great’s translation of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae (
The last three decades of the 19th century were phobia’s belle époque. During this first phase of investigation there was, it must have seemed, no species of terror, however febrile,...
In June 1971 it was learned that a hitherto unknown tribe had been found living in the dense rainforest of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Reportedly, the group consisted of 27 members,...
Among other books by the author of this study is one called Boredom, hailed by the paradoxophile Adam Phillips as ‘spry’, a description that would just about serve for the style of
The first anecdotal evidence that Aids-related illness and death were contributing to a crisis in African farming came in the mid-1980s; the first consultants’ reports and academic studies...
A poor gardener in Macedonia was riding a donkey when a soldier addressed him in Latin, asking him where he was taking the beast; unable to understand the question, he said nothing, whereupon the...
Do we today have an available bioethics? Yes, we do, a bad one: what the Germans call Bindestrich-Ethik, or ‘hyphen-ethics’, where what gets lost in the hyphenation is ethics as such....
Last November I put on a new suit and went to view some luxury flats in the North London suburbs. Princess Park Manor on Friern Barnet Road – ‘a supremely elegant residence set in...
Arabs have been travelling east for centuries. They settled chiefly in what are now Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, though ‘settled’ hardly describes the movements from town to...
Pupils at the Albert Einstein Middle School in Sacramento, California are not allowed to wear sandals without socks. Einstein himself would have been sent home to change, sandals without socks...
What are experiences of artworks like? Kant’s Critique of Judgment is relatively clear on this point: aesthetic judgments prompt what he calls an ‘agitation of the mind’. How...
There is a nasty, perhaps Freudian moment in Ford Madox Ford’s novel Some Do Not, in which, in the middle of a conversation, something occurs to the hero Tietjens: ‘Suddenly he...
There’s a pretty steady effluence these days of works of sub-Darwinian evolutionary psychology, books that propound a startling, and often startlingly simple new theory to explain, and...
The 1990s were characterised by the astonishing market penetration of products such as mobile phones, Microsoft Windows and Starbucks coffee shops, but an even more remarkable example of booming...
By the time I was twenty I was living in a slum house in Sheffield. I had a husband and no money; those things I could explain. I had a pain which I could not explain; it seemed to wander about my...