John Smith was ‘one of them’. Tony Blair is ‘one of them’. And so are Chris Smith and Jack Straw and half the Shadow Cabinet and many more on the backbenches including...
Martha Nussbaum is a classical scholar and moral philosopher who in several books and a great many essays has advanced a thesis about the cognitive power of emotions. Feeling, she says, is part...
My childhood was spent in the command economy of evangelical Christianity. Life was centrally planned: all negotiations had to pass by Jesus’s desk. Language was religiously inflated. When...
Another book on Nietzsche – to add to the thousands that already attest his towering presence in our world. But this one is different. It restricts itself to one central theme, Nietzsche as...
Suppose I perform an action certified by morality as good – say, giving money to charity. I then do something good because it is good. We might say that this action had the moral property
The Director of the International Studies Center at New York University believes that the world has recently made giant strides towards becoming much fairer. He makes the case as well as it could...
The crime reporter said: ‘They don’t kill as many children here in Salvador as they do in Rio and São Paolo.’ Salvador has a population of two and a quarter million, Rio de...
Man, said Aristotle, is a political animal; it is his nature to live in a state. Men and women may live in political communities, modern liberals have retorted, but there’s nothing...
The dust-jacket of this handsome book reproduces a medieval manuscript miniature of mounted Arabs beating drums and blowing what are probably mizmars (woodwind instruments). According to the...
For too long Islamic studies have existed in an academic ghetto which reinforced the essentialist view shared by the Islamologues, that Islam was somehow ‘different’ from the West. A...
Cambridge only woke up to the great achievements of Peter Stern when he died there aged 70 in 1991. Stern’s adoptive university, to which he found himself evacuated from the LSE after...
Early in this century, people who read Lytton Strachey, and liked to think of themselves as modern, prided themselves on lacking a sense of Sin. Nowadays people who read Michel Foucault, and who...
When William Tyndale had completed his 1526 New Testament he set about learning Hebrew and translated from the original, with the aid of Luther’s version, the five books of Moses, the...
Menachem Begin and his Likud union of nationalist and liberal parties won their first electoral victory on 17 May 1977, bringing to an end three decades of Labour rule. The Likud was to dominate...
‘How do you get to Carnegie Hall?’ ‘Practice, practice.’ Here’s a different way: start anywhere you like and take a step at random. If it’s a step in the right...
Are judges flirting with ‘judicial supremacism’ by questioning the sovereignty of Parliament? Or are ministers flouting the rule of law, by interfering with judicial independence? Is...
Human beings in different cultures are much more alike, psychologically speaking, than most anthropologists and sociologists suppose. There’s a great deal of substance to the idea of a...
As Plato knew, the road to something helpful is not only hard, but unpredictable, and the motives that keep people moving down it don’t necessarily have to do with the desire to help. They include that...