Gareth Evans

Gareth Evans is a Fellow of University College, Oxford and Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy.

Letter

Mirror Ball

29 June 2023

To build on Rosemary Hill’s remarks about Noël Coward’s acting, it is instructive to consider his first and final film appearances (LRB, 29 June). Aged just eighteen, he received a double credit as ‘the man with a wheelbarrow/a villager in the streets’ in D.W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1918). In this First World War drama, set in France, filmed partly under barrage near the front...
Letter

If You Were There

5 January 2023

Paul Mendez mentions that Wham!’s concerts in China in 1985 were the first by any Western group. What’s almost as remarkable is that the accompanying feature-length concert film was directed by Lindsay Anderson. Wham! were then co-managed by Simon Napier-Bell, who was openly gay – unlike Anderson, who repressed his homosexuality, channelling it, according to Malcolm McDowell, into an unrequited...
Letter

On Hoarding

8 September 2022

Jon Day’s fascinating Diary about the hoarding impulse had me thinking about world-making and defence (LRB, 8 September). The hoarder creates a material barrier against a threatening environment, behind which they construct a bearable cosmology. Day’s question, following Adam Phillips, feels crucial: who’s labelling the hoard as such? There is a correlation here with much of what is called...
Letter
My admiration for Hugh Roberts as a North Africa scholar and analyst of Islamic activism remains unbounded (LRB, 17 November). I was president of the International Crisis Group from 2000 to 2009, and I believe that our 2005 report Understanding Islamism, of which he was the primary author, was one of the finest and most influential ICG ever produced. But I am deeply underwhelmed by his lengthy attempt...

A Technical Philosopher

Hilary Putnam, 19 May 1983

Gareth Evans died of cancer when he was barely 34 years of age. He had been working on this book for several years; the task of completing it from his notes was carried out by John McDowell. (The...

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