‘Objectivity’ is a word at once indispensable and elusive. It can be metaphysical, methodological and moral by turns, occasionally in the same paragraph. Sometimes it refers to the...
On 18 May 1593 a warrant was issued to ‘apprehend’ Christopher Marlowe, and on 20 May he was brought before the Privy Council for questioning. He was not detained, but was ordered to...
In Westminster Abbey a couple of years ago, I stood for over an hour talking to Neal Ascherson. It was one of those freezing January evenings – cold stone, long shadows – and we...
‘Any form represented by few individuals,’ Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, ‘will, during fluctuations in the seasons or in the number of its enemies, run a good chance of...
What exactly is book history? Literature students consulting their reference libraries would be hard put to find an answer: ‘history of the book’ appears nowhere in M.H....
‘Spinozist’ used to be what ‘Postmodernist’ is now, the worst thing one intellectual could call another. For reasons explained in Jonathan Israel’s fascinating The...
Walking through Tromsø, lashed by a frigid wind, I wonder how Nansen seriously expected the world to believe that this was the tranquil land of Thule. But the merging of sky, land and sea which deterred...
Presented as a pendant to Age of Extremes, a personal portrait hung opposite the historical landscape, what light does Interesting Times throw on Eric Hobsbawm’s vision of the 20th century,...
‘We should flatten a country or two,’ said a young man to the television camera on 11 September last year. ‘Justice, not revenge,’ the Roman Catholic bishops warned that...
‘Lack of a historical sense is the hereditary defect of philosophers . . . So what is needed from now on is historical philosophising, and with it the virtue of modesty.’...
There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916) As Lloyd George’s wartime Director of Information, John Buchan urged...
A new edition of Aristophanes’ Acharnians, by S. Douglas Olson, was published recently (Oxford, £65), in time for George Bush not to read it before he blunders into Iraq....
Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son was one of the first and most wounding of the Edwardian attacks on the high Victorians. Casting himself as a ‘little helpless child’, Gosse...
What was it that Samuel Johnson said about Laurence Sterne’s unusual novel? ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’ I wonder whether the Doctor would have said...
The Criterion, T.S. Eliot’s periodical, ran from shortly after the First World War to the very eve of World War Two. Or, if one prefers, from one of Eliot’s major bouts of depression...
In the shopping precinct that now clings to the skirts of the old Reading Room, a table is laid with portable derivatives of the Rosetta Stone. The number of them hints at a BM merchandising...
In 1974 Robert Nozick shattered the political complacency of the philosophical establishment when he published Anarchy, State and Utopia, a book arguing that justice had nothing to do with...
Published anonymously in 1844, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was a history of everything, from the beginning of the Universe and the solar system to the spiritual destiny of...