Late 16th-century England had no very great portrait painters, but at least one of its dramatists created a gallery of images – principally through his characters – at once brilliant...
Those who offer scientific explanations of the pervasiveness of religion in human life are usually not religious themselves, and their explanations are not intended to be compatible with the...
I once met a young priest in the west of Ireland who told me that he was to be sent on the missions the following day. ‘Where are you being posted?’ I asked. ‘Birmingham,’...
On 12 March 1689, James II, the deposed king of England and Ireland, Catholic and absolutist, landed at Kinsale on the south coast of Ireland with a substantial French force. He had fled England...
I began burning books during my third year in China. The first book I burned was called A Swedish Gospel Singer. On the cover there was a drawing of a blonde girl wearing a crucifix with her...
During the break-up with Kimberly Quinn that precipitated his break-up with the Home Office, David Blunkett is reported to have warned her: ‘The law is on my side. I know because I made the...
In 1959 the psychological doctrine known as ‘behaviourism’ was at the peak of its influence. Pioneered in the early 20th century by Edward Lee Thorndike, Clark Hull and J.B. Watson,...
When Germany’s ultimatum – delivered, as the Kaiser had explained, ‘only with the friendliest intentions towards Belgium’ – expired in August 1914, von...
The leprous spawn of scattered Israel Spreads its contagion in your English blood; Teeming corruption rises like a flood Whose fountain swelters in the womb of hell. Your Jew-kept politicians buy...
Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the retiring Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late June. Before she is...
For Tony Judt What is a collective passion? And is it something we should want, or get excited about? Today the political climate across the Western world is marked, we are told, by a curious...
This book describes itself on its jacket as ‘a retelling of the life of Jesus’ and also as a book about ‘how stories become stories’; which might lead one to expect some...
What rules the behaviour of human beings? Our needs, as materialist and utilitarian thinkers believe? Our intellect and the dictates of reason, as Platonists and Hegelians hope? Or do we obey our...
On 6 October 1981, President Anwar al-Sadat attended a parade to mark the anniversary of the crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 war with Israel. It was also an occasion to display the...
Four young Muslim men with Yorkshire accents are taking turns to address the camera in front of a sagging cloth backdrop. ‘Eh up, you unbelieving kuffar bastards,’ one of them begins....
This is one of Christopher Black’s verdicts on the work of the Roman Inquisition: The human casualties among major thinkers were fewer than might have been expected; Bruno might have been...
During the first months of this year, the embers of a long running legal controversy have reignited in the United States. ‘Of all the issues,’ Rahm Emanuel was told by the senior...
Watched from a safe distance, Arthur Koestler’s life was like a Catherine-wheel breaking free from its stake. Leaping and spinning and scattering crowds, emitting fountains of alarming...