The Victorians, who idealised work, nevertheless reserved the palm of social esteem for persons whose private means enabled them to lead lives of pleasurable idleness. We in the late 20th century...
A kind of revelation came to the anthropologist Marcel Mauss when he was in hospital in New York. He wondered where previously he had seen girls walking the way his nurses walked. At last he...
Most people, without thinking about it very much, elide sexual differences between men and women with gender, the cultural categories of masculinity and femininity. Surely, one might imagine, the...
Academician I.R. Shafarevich is a world-famous mathematician specialising in algebra and number theory, a member of the Royal Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Andrei...
How poignant newspaper headlines can be! Like this one: ‘Rabbi Julia Neuberger shares a feeling of permanent exile with the refugee poet’ (Observer, 11 March). And yet I find this a...
‘What different things Rome stands for to each generation of travellers,’ one upper-crust New York widow tells another near the start of Edith Wharton’s ‘Roman...
‘We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly,’ Haines says to Stephen Dedalus in the first chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘it seems history is to...
For deaf people, especially for those born deaf, this has been the best of quarter-centuries. The happy events have not been medical but social. The deaf have been irreversibly granted their own...
These two writers are both concerned with the old and the elderly, but to very different effect. Minois presents a repertoire of comments on the old, from the ancient world to the 16th century:...
Around 1890 Colombia was governed by Dr Rafael Nuñez. This ravaged old intellectual, a late convert from the fleshpots of Liverpool – he had been Consul there – and liberalism,...
Monday 29 January. Things have changed. We are at the Russian Embassy to see Andrei Nekrasov’s execrable biopic about Pasternak. A huge video projector squats while Sergei Shilov, the...
The myth of Cleopatra may offer women an image of power, but at the cost of implicating them in the misogynistic fantasies of patriarchy. For women, ‘Cleopatra’ is a trap.
The history of the British Raj is emotional, complex and controversial. It invokes guilt and shame, nostalgia and pride, for diferent reasons, in Britain as well as in India. It represents not...
More than three centuries ago. Sir Thomas Browne noted ‘the humour of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times present’. He added...
In 1787 the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade obtained, from an unrecorded artist, a design for its seal ‘expressive of an African in chains in a supplicating...
In the days of the Boxer Rebellion, when Chinese wore pigtails and exposure to foreign values was compulsory, they knew that Westerners were Chinese upside-down. As Yang remarks in The Miraculous...
Few things unhinge the British as much as doublet and hose. The merest hint unleashes golden fantasies of order and well-being, yoking together gentility and free-born earthiness within a deep...
‘The Aristotle ... was already burning. Meanwhile, some sparks had flown towards the walls, and already the volumes of another bookcase were crumpling in the fury of the fire.’ So, in...