To accuse the book of Genesis of being patriarchal is like complaining that cats throw up fur-balls, or dogs sniff each other’s bottoms. It’s not pleasant, but that’s cats and...
If we picture the mind as an orifice then we cannot help but wonder what it should be open to and what it should be open for. And how it, or rather we, make such vital decisions. An open mind is...
Suppose God took it into his head to make another world just like ours; if one is good, why wouldn’t two be better? There’s a lot he’d have to see to; dividing the light from...
To enter Greenwich Magistrates Court you must first go through an airport-style metal detector which squeals at the slightest provocation. The Court is a small Victorian building with...
Some time in the middle of the Seventies in Iran, a Marxist revolutionary named Bizhan Jazani warned from prison against an appeal to religion in the struggle against the Shah. ‘This...
For most of us, rites of passage are chaotic family events, with crying babies, cranky children, bored teenagers, tipsy fathers and complaining grandmothers – an excuse for a party, a...
To the modern eye the European Middle Ages were palpably Christian, with all those cathedrals and crusades. But in the minds of the Renaissance scholars who invented the term, the adjective...
Shortly after the end of World War Two, a young American professor submitted an article to a leading philosophical journal, explaining a difficult point in one of Spinoza’s arguments. In...
Back in the Sixties, before he became the bad boy of American philosophy, Richard Rorty struck his colleagues as a safe and promising young man. His first book, published in 1967, was an...
A.D. Nuttall is probably the most philosophically-minded of modern literary critics, and he has the additional merit of assuming that at some level philosophical (or theological) problems are...
Anatomical cabinets, displaying bodies bottled whole or in segments, are gripping artists’ and writers’ imaginations: the Enlightenment’s relish for physical data banks excites...
Being affectionate with numbers, endlessly wondering about them, loving them, is, though impersonal and bloodless, no more strange perhaps than being possessed by the endless ramifications of...
The posthumous English publication of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s mammoth novel Shadows on the Hudson has created such a tumel. Critics have been arguing about the quality of the novel,...
When, suddenly, a voice intrudes with a direct challenge to a writer in his own text, the reader is put on special alert. Think of the charged encounter in Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Flight...
The title startles. The children of Noah were tower-raisers, nomads, farmers, slaves, desert wanderers, war mongers, city-dwellers, poets and musicians even, but sailors? Jewish seafaring? Jewish...
Have you heard the one about the children who laughed at the prophet and called him ‘slaphead’? A bear tore 42 of them to pieces. Or the one about the maid, expecting her...
Everybody knows that Abelard was a philosopher, the lover of Heloise, and castrated in consequence: a romantic figure, like say Tchaikovsky, in an age of epics. Michael Clanchy’s life of...
Many of the phantoms explore their own condition, pondering what it means to be a ghost. One revenant explains that he can speak, though tongueless, by resonating the words in his chest; another that the...