What happened to the Labour Party?

W.G. Runciman: The difference between then and now, 22 June 2006

... a diamond – the large middle class between a small upper class and a small lower class, which Aristotle thought was the best guarantee of political stability. Taken together, these two concomitant trends go a long way to explain the difference which is neatly captured in two remarks by two different observers. The first is Kenneth Galbraith, in The ...

Very like St Paul

Ian Sansom: Johnny Cash, 9 March 2006

The Man Called Cash: The Life, Love and Faith of an American Legend 
by Steve Turner.
Bloomsbury, 363 pp., £8.99, February 2006, 0 7475 8079 0
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Walk the Line 
directed by James Mangold.
November 2005
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... of the Greeks and to give them a little Christian twist or kink, much as, say, Aquinas did with Aristotle, or as T.S. Eliot does in his plays. In Walk the Line, Joaquin Phoenix, playing Cash, is clearly on a mythic journey: there is first the early trauma, the violent death of Cash’s older brother; then there’s Cash out on the open road, the young ...

Getting the Ick

John Kerrigan: Consent in Shakespeare, 14 December 2023

Shakespeare on Consent 
by Amanda Bailey.
Routledge, 197 pp., £17.99, March, 978 0 367 18453 7
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Shakespeare and Virtue: A Handbook 
edited by Julia Reinhard Lupton and Donovan Sherman.
Cambridge, 421 pp., £95, January, 978 1 108 84340 9
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Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion 
by Bradley J. Irish.
Bloomsbury, 270 pp., £75, March, 978 1 350 21398 2
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... some of the things students said to him about Isabella, including the kid who argued, invoking Aristotle on continence, that ‘unwanted sex is not a trivial consideration.’ Chastity, in this view, means upholding ‘a standard of personal integrity that really is “more” valuable than the life of a brother who is himself, after all, incontinent’. A ...

Going Up

Tobias Gregory: The View from Above, 18 May 2023

Celestial Aspirations: Classical Impulses in British Poetry and Art 
by Philip Hardie.
Princeton, 353 pp., £38, April 2022, 978 0 691 19786 9
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... theory. Galileo’s findings drew opposition from university men affronted at the challenge to Aristotle and Ptolemy, and from clergy who objected that the new view of the heavens contradicted scriptural passages such as Joshua 10:12-13, in which Joshua commanded the Sun not to set until the Israelites could complete a massacre:Then spake Joshua to the ...

On Interest

Adam Phillips, 20 June 1996

... way from infancy to feel joy and grief at the right things: true education is precisely this. Aristotle, Ethics In ‘Civilised Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness’, Freud makes a simple and still astonishing assertion: ‘The sexual behaviour of a human being often lays down the pattern for all his other modes of reacting to life.’ Integral to ...

Against Whales

Paul Keegan, 20 July 1995

The Moon by Whale Light 
by Diane Ackerman.
Phoenix, 260 pp., £6.99, May 1994, 1 85799 087 0
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The Last Panda 
by George Schaller.
Chicago, 292 pp., $13.95, May 1993, 0 226 73629 6
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The Great Ape Project 
edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer.
Fourth Estate, 312 pp., £9.99, June 1993, 1 85702 126 6
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... and able-minded chimpanzees are not by analogy disabled humans – any more than seals are, pace Aristotle, deformed quadrupeds – what, finally, is being served by such mismeasurings of like and unlike? Why not unlike with unlike as the catalyst for an enlarged moral community? Beings who are equal in the moral sense need not be like one another. Or, as ...

Frameworks of Comparison

Benedict Anderson, 21 January 2016

... What I overheard Bloom say was this: ‘Well, you know that the ancient Greeks, even Plato and Aristotle, had no concept of “power” as we know it today.’ It had never occurred to me that the two philosophical masters, whom we were always told to revere as the founders of Western thought, had no idea of power in their heads. I rushed to the library to ...
... more – err in the same way as Saint-Just – if they think that the virtues as described by Aristotle or St Thomas are the necessary and sufficient materials of ethical self-understanding at the end of the 20th century. There is another way in which the demands of ethical disagreement as we more ordinarily meet it may seem to call on the theory of the ...

Tolerant Repression

Blair Worden, 10 May 1990

Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal 
by Tom Mayer.
Cambridge, 326 pp., £32.50, April 1989, 0 521 36104 4
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Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII 
by Alistair Fox.
Blackwell, 317 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 631 13566 9
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The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Portraits at the Court of Henry VIII 
by Retha Warnicke.
Cambridge, 326 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 521 37000 0
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English Travellers Abroad 1604-1667 
by John Stoye.
Yale, 448 pp., £12.95, January 1990, 0 300 04180 2
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... interest, over ‘the common weal’. Its roots are the ethical ones that had been located by Aristotle and by Cicero: tyranny, the rule of will rather than of law, is the triumph of passion over reason. Just as More’s Hythloday thinks that, under monarchy, reason will always lose out to will and appetite, so Starkey laments that ‘our country has been ...

Addicted to Unpredictability

James Wood: Knut Hamsun, 26 November 1998

Knut Hamsun. Selected Letters. Vol. II: 1898-1952 
edited by Harald Næss and James McFarlane.
Norvik, 351 pp., £14.95, April 1998, 1 870041 13 5
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Hunger 
by Knut Hamsun, translated by Sverre Lyngstad.
Rebel Inc, 193 pp., £6.99, October 1996, 0 86241 625 6
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... a navvy and for nine months as a tramconductor in Chicago. He was known for his habit of reading Aristotle and Euripides between stops. He was very poor and weathered the deep winter of Chicago by wearing newspaper under his clothes; his colleagues liked to touch him to make him crackle. When Hamsun returned from the States he was 29, and although he had had ...

Adrift from Locality

James Davidson: Captain Cook’s Mistake, 3 November 2005

Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa 
by Marshall Sahlins.
Chicago, 334 pp., £21, December 2004, 0 226 73400 5
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... and so objective about history in the way that Praxiteles, say, was objective about human bodies, Aristotle about animals, Hipparchus about the movement of the stars: that the Greeks, uniquely, were not ‘natives’, but famously, peculiarly, engaged with the world as it is, although one might well want to contextualise this ‘Greek Miracle’, a not ...

In theory

Christopher Ricks, 16 April 1981

... of elaborated concatenation. It is analogous to the argument about exactness and cogency on which Aristotle is to be believed: ‘It is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness in each kind which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to ...

On Resistance

Adam Phillips, 14 August 2025

... to think of ourselves now – in these times and in these places – as flourishing, in the way Aristotle did. Or to think of a life, again in classical terms, justified and enjoyed as the pursuit of a sovereign good (Lacan is explicit and insistent that there is no sovereign good, and that such fantasies are no longer viable ways of holding us or keeping ...

Canetti and Power

John Bayley, 17 December 1981

Auto da Fé 
by Elias Canetti, translated by C.V. Wedgwood.
Cape, 464 pp., £7.95, January 1982, 0 224 00568 5
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The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Continuum, 268 pp., $12.95, June 1979, 0 8164 9103 8
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The Human Province 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Continuum, 281 pp., $12.95, June 1978, 0 8164 9335 9
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Crowds and Power 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Carol Stewart.
Penguin, 575 pp., £2.95, October 1978, 0 14 003616 4
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Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Christopher Middleton.
Marion Boyars, 121 pp., £5.95, October 1976, 0 7145 1136 6
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The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit 
by Elias Canetti, translated by J.A. Underwood.
Marion Boyars, 103 pp., £5.50, January 1978, 0 7145 2579 0
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The Conscience of Words 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Continuum, 246 pp., $12.95, May 1979, 0 8164 9334 0
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... is always true to the psychology of the society it relates to. Conversely, he has little use for Aristotle the rationalist, who is more interested in the processes of knowledge than in those of suffering, of who does what to whom. As an analyst of the power process, Canetti is equally contemptuous of the empirical and factual historian and of the ...

History as a Bunch of Flowers

James Davidson: Jacob Burckhardt, 20 August 1998

The Greeks and Greek Civilisation 
by Jacob Burckhardt, edited by Oswyn Murray, translated by Sheila Stern.
HarperCollins, 449 pp., £24.99, May 1998, 0 00 255855 6
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... an ambitious goal for any student of culture. Many modern accounts simply refer to Plato and Aristotle for ‘Greek’ ways of thinking, which is rather like reading Roger Scruton for a modern British worldview. Burckhardt is not about to make that error and warns against taking the views of philosophers as representative. The size of the Greek Cultural ...