The Jeddah sailed from Singapore on 17 July 1880, bound for Penang and Jeddah, with 778 men, 147 women and 67 children on board. Muslims from the Malay Archipelago, they were travelling to Mecca...
Literary biography is one of the background noises of our age. It’s a decent, friendly sort of hum, like the Sunday papers or chatter on a train. It gives the punters a bit of history and a...
I think it was P.G. Wodehouse who observed that the English strike Americans as funny when they are just being English. Similarly, philosophers strike the laity as funny when they are just being...
Two lessons emerged from my two-week stint of French jury service. The first is that if you want to commit a murder in France, make it as savage as possible: you will have a good chance of...
As every schoolchild knows by now, a new book by Žižek is supposed to include, in no special order, discussions of Hegel, Marx and Kant; various pre- and post-socialist anecdotes and...
The death toll in Iraq continues to rise: more than 2600 American soldiers, 113 British troops, 130 from other countries, perhaps 40,000 Iraqi civilians. And more than 70 journalists,...
‘I entirely understand the desire, and indeed need, for Israel to defend itself properly,’ Tony Blair said on 14 July. ‘As a sovereign nation, Israel has every right to defend...
Much of the modern reputation of Lancelot Andrewes stems from an essay T.S. Eliot published in 1926, in which he ranked the sermons with ‘the finest English prose of their time, of any...
On a summer morning in July 1999, a massive drug bust took place in the Texas panhandle town of Tulia. In a few hours, beginning before dawn, the town’s police force, the county sheriff and...
Look at Chapters 13 to 16 of the Book of Judges, and what do you see there? Is it Samson the hero, Samson the lummox, or Samson the poster boy for gang moronics, for self-destructive,...
Israel’s legal system – an important basis of its claim to be a liberal democracy – acts in concert with the government to support and enable the detention without trial of...
Not since World War Two has the nature and adequacy of international law provoked such a debate, both in Britain and abroad. A great number of international agreements have been adopted over the...
It is 21 years this summer since the Battle of the Beanfield, the bloody confrontation at Cholderton in Wiltshire between police and a travellers’ convoy heading for Stonehenge, which...
‘We posture as apostles of fair play, as good sportsmen, as professional knights-errant – and throw beer bottles at the umpire when he refuses to cheat for our side,’ H.L....
As marriages of convenience go, few can have turned out less conveniently than that of George IV and Caroline of Brunswick. The couple brought out the worst in each other, and there was a great...
Henry VIII is the most immediately recognisable of all English monarchs, present company excepted. He has been declared a national icon, and we are told that he vies with Adolf Hitler for the...
Who now still reads Karl Jaspers? Compared to the other still influential giants of 20th-century German philosophy – Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Habermas, Arendt, Cassirer and...
There are some who will have taken a sadistic pleasure in the failure of the recent attempt by the News of the World’s undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood, the ‘fake sheikh’, to...