If you go to The Cambridge Illuminations: Ten Centuries of Book Production in the Medieval West, make sure it’s not on a Sunday or a Monday. The exhibition, which runs until 11 December, is...
Søren Kierkegaard spent much of the summer of 1855 staring out of the windows of his cramped second-floor apartment in the centre of old Copenhagen, across the road from the Church of Our...
True or false? 1. Suicide bombers suffer not from a sense of having lost their place in a community but from a sense that they have failed in their quest to find a new, Westernised form of...
A modern criminal trial can be exceedingly inconvenient. The more fairly conducted it is, the less certain the outcome. The accuser can end up all but in the dock; the accused may walk away from...
In March 1998 a 24-year-old woman entered the United Kingdom from Uganda. She used a false name and a false passport. She was extremely ill and within a couple of days was admitted to Guy’s...
The title puts it fairly. Sacred books don’t spring out of thin air; there was a Bible before ever its stories and laws were fixed in writing. How the Bible Became a Book starts with the...
Oscar Wilde called experience the name one gives to one’s mistakes, while for Samuel Johnson it was what hope triumphed over for those who married a second time. Emerson thought all...
John Carey, former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, an authority on Milton and Donne and Dickens and others, the very model of a Merton Professor, has also been, for decades, the...
This is an extraordinary – and extraordinarily interesting – book, a model of intellectual biography. Henry Sidgwick’s day job was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at...
Growing up in Cookstown in County Tyrone, I would occasionally wonder what it would be like to be Martin McGuinness’s son. He was infamous for being Sinn Féin’s number two, and...
Better to wonder if ten thousand angels Could waltz on the head of a pin And not feel crowded than to wonder if now’s the time for the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire To teach the...
In a speech given early last month, Michael Howard shared his thoughts on education with the Welsh Conservative Party Conference in Cardiff. He was mainly concerned with the problem of...
On 21 September 2001, a man walking across Tower Bridge saw what appeared to be a corpse floating in the river. Twenty minutes later, a police launch took the corpse on board and discovered that...
Hypocrisy is such a ubiquitous feature of democratic politics that it can be hard to take it seriously. Indeed, taking it seriously is sometimes held to be a sign of political immaturity, or...
This book changed my sense of the big story of Soviet history as well as the big story of the Jews in the modern world.* Chapter 4, in particular, the interpretative history of Jews in the Soviet...
Alongside cutting crime, hospital waiting-lists and taxes, cutting the number of asylum seekers can be depended on to rank high among pre-election promises. This year, the Tories’ cap on...
The government’s reluctance to allow intercept evidence to be used in court to procure the conviction of terrorist suspects seems mysterious and self-defeating: why deny yourself such a key...
Ever since Mary Douglas’s anthropological foray into the laws of impurity in Leviticus in Purity and Danger (1966), her work on the Bible has been constantly stimulating and, at its best,...