Pregnant with Monsters

Terry Eagleton: Schopenhauer makes a stir, 4 December 2025

Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist 
by David Bather Woods.
Chicago, 294 pp., £24, November, 978 0 226 82976 0
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... lack of complexity is also the reason he lends himself to popularising accounts like this one. David Bather Woods writes in a deliberately non-intimidating style as he takes the reader through the various stages of Schopenhauer’s uneventful life. He was born in Danzig in 1788 and visited London as a teenager, where he made sure to drop in at the Bedlam ...

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Daniel Soar: Books of the Year of the Year, 18 December 2008

... Times’s analysis of books on ‘Business and Society’ was carried out by Stefan Stern, the FT’s management correspondent (who has been ‘writing about business, finance and management for the past 16 years’). Modelling his technique on that of America’s paper of record, Stern refuses hyperbole (though not superlatives), and sticks to the ...

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Adam Shatz: Acoustic Weapons, 23 July 2009

... the support of a number of artists whose work has been on the interrogation playlist, including David Gray, Massive Attack and Rage against the Machine. Reprieve, the group that provides legal representation for detainees at Guantánamo, has joined with a group of musicians to form Zero dB, an initiative whose goal is ‘to end the suffering caused by music ...

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Thomas Jones: Politicians’ Spouses, 11 June 2009

... rest of it look like very small beer when compared to the £344,000 that Tessa Jowell’s husband, David Mills, stands accused of receiving from Silvio Berlusconi in return for the well-spun evidence he gave in two corruption trials involving the Italian prime minister in the late 1990s. In February Mills was found guilty of corruption and given four and a ...

In Upper Nazareth

Ilan Pappe: ‘Judaisation’, 10 September 2009

... of Arabs into Nazareth, as he calls it, is a national priority. The city was built in the 1950s. David Ben-Gurion was outraged by the presence of so many Arabs in the Galilee when he toured the region in 1953, a few days before he retired for a year and half from his premiership. He appointed the director general of the Ministry of Defence, Shimon Peres, to ...

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Daniel Soar: Remote Killing, 24 September 2015

... a specialist team at RAF Waddington trained at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. Over the summer, David Cameron had suggested that he hoped the British air war against Isis could be extended from Iraq to Syria. But, he said, nothing would change – after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Iraq was the only permitted target – until Parliament was reconvened ...

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Martin Loughlin: Tax Credits, 19 November 2015

... to the welfare bill. Given their commitment to protect pensioner benefits, tax credits – despite David Cameron’s earlier promise not to cut them – were pushed to the front of the queue, and in the July budget Osborne announced that tax credits would be cut by £4.4 billion. This amounted to 15 per cent of the total tax credit budget, and meant that more ...

At the Barbican

Liz Jobey: Strange and Familiar , 2 June 2016

... self-conscious, not sure what they will unwittingly disclose. By the later stages of the show, as David Chandler points out in his catalogue essay, Britain was often just a stopover for those intent on creating an international body of work in which their own style was paramount. Sometimes their subjects are its victims. The American Bruce Gilden manages to ...

On the Titanic

Rosemary Hill: ‘Ocean Liners’ at the V&A, 24 May 2018

... indulgence without a destination, merely a cruise. The exhibition continues up to the 1960s with David Hockney’s Pop Inn ‘a dedicated space for teenagers’ on the Canberra, which looks as unconvincing as it sounds. Then, the final falling off, the behemoths of Disney and Royal Caribbean which can each carry 6750 of the 24 million people who took cruises ...

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Thomas Jones: How to concoct a conspiracy theory, 20 October 2005

... at the Stade de France in Paris, a match in which France defeated Brazil 3-0; on the same day, David Ginola, retired French footballer and sometime L’Oréal model, became the new face of the anti-landmine movement. So far, so unconnected. But now let’s posit the existence of a mysterious secret organisation working tirelessly and ruthlessly to improve ...

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Thomas Jones: When is a planet not a planet?, 18 August 2005

... of the year; U is the 21st letter of the alphabet). Brown and his colleagues, Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz, have submitted a name to the International Astronomical Union, but it will remain secret until it gets the IAU’s stamp of approval. Unofficially, they’re calling it ‘Xena’, after the character played by Lucy Lawless in the camp fantasy ...

At the National Gallery

Peter Campbell: Impressionist Pictures, 2 November 2000

... that the new surface would have displeased anyone committed to the enamel-smooth facture of David, Ingres and the Salon conservatives.Much of what seemed new could, of course, be found in the detail of old pictures. Brettell, imagining the stimulus to gestural painting a visit to the Louvre would have offered an Impressionist painter, reproduces details ...

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Thomas Jones: I'll eat my modem, 10 August 2000

... renders most other fiction meaningless. One can imagine Pynchon and Ballard and Stephen King and David Foster Wallace bowing at Mark Danielewski’s feet, choking with astonishment, surprise, laughter and awe. I feel privileged to be among its first readers. Will I ever recover?’ House of leaves has at least three narrative strands, with at least as many ...

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Thomas Jones: How to Type like a Man, 10 May 2007

... of The Iron Whim concerns itself with the likes of Paul Auster, Bram Stoker, William Burroughs, David Cronenberg, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, J.G. Ballard and Hunter S. Thompson: in other words, men. He says more than once that he’s less interested in typewriters as machines (once upon a time the word also referred to the ...

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John Sturrock: Don't Bother to Read, 22 March 2007

... quotes from in sufficient detail to wear as an effective disguise include Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, David Lodge and Umberto Eco – he always allots the book he’s citing to one class or another, giving page references from books he admits to not knowing or from one of his own books (Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? no less) he wants us to believe he’s ...