It’s a strange thing when, in the course of a murder trial at the Old Bailey, a cracked plastic bath is carried into the courtroom, and a second strange thing when no one at the time thinks...
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold...
I’ve been basking in a warm glow from A.N. Wilson’s recent book about Iris Murdoch* – I mean its way of holding Plato and Kant not quite on a level with each other but far above...
In an art gallery over the last decade you might have happened on one of the following. A room empty except for a stack of identical sheets of paper – white, sky-blue, or printed with a...
There is a beguiling poem by Raymond Carver which, like many modern poems, though more cheerfully than some, spends most of its short life mulling over the conditions of its own possibility....
In November 1619 René Descartes retired into a ‘stove’ in order to reflect on the foundations of our knowledge of ourselves and the world. From his meditations he produced the...
Already hailed in America as ‘climactic’ and ‘monumental’, The Way and the Word is the product of a collaboration between an eminent Hellenist and an expert Sinologist. It...
There may be many readers who, on hearing of J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize, immediately thought about the cost of clarity. There is so much, after all, missing from Coetzee’s...
‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ Stanley was spot on: it was Dr Livingstone. Elsewise his presuming so wouldn’t have become the stuff of legend. A question suggests itself: how did...
I buy my visa to enter Turkey from an immigration officer just inside the terminal building at Esenboga Airport in Ankara. I give him my passport and two grubby fivers, caked with the residue of...
Three hundred years ago an Englishman charged with, say, robbery could expect to be interrogated by a local magistrate, held in jail until the King’s justices next rode in on circuit,...
Nietzsche’s most famous proclamation of the death of God is voiced by a madman, and directed not at believers but at unbelievers, who mock the madman’s claim to be seeking God by the...
Thrasymachus, a well-known teacher of rhetoric, has listened with growing impatience to the discussion of justice in the first Book of Plato’s Republic. ‘What balderdash you two have...
Back in the 1960s, when I was studying to become a Sufi saint in North Africa, my Sheikh told me to read the Koran again and again, stopping only for prayers, meals and sleep. At that stage in my...
David Blunkett’s latest Criminal Justice Bill, this Government’s 12th piece of such legislation since coming to power in 1997, will go a long way to producing a caste of untouchables...
An often cited and much admired article by Charles Reich that appeared in the Yale Law Journal for 1964 tells us that ‘property performs the function of maintaining independence, dignity...
In the opening sentences of his last published work, The Passions of the Soul (1649), Descartes signalled his own modernity with a withering dismissal of the ancients, whose defects he found...
In November last year, to the relief of the Government, Myra Hindley died. Hindley, who had served 36 years, was the most high-profile victim of a series of Administrations which, in pursuit of...