It used to be said in Whitehall that the first job of a royal commission was to lay down a decent cellar. Royal commissions were grand affairs, the Rolls Royces of public deliberation, with a...
Eighty-six people died in the Waco siege in April, including the ‘prophet’ David Koresh and 17 children fathered by him. David Leppard, a crime reporter with the Sunday Times Insight...
Donald Davidson is perhaps the most distinguished philosopher in history never to have written a book. Indeed, he did not get round to writing articles until he was into his forties (he is now...
The Sather lecturers are invited by the Department of Classics at Berkeley, but they are not always Classicists in a narrow sense. Bernard Williams rightly and proudly points to the precedent of...
Pray, sir, give me leave to ask you ... what, in your opinion, is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue amongst the polite, both in town and country? In letters and common...
‘All conditioned things decay’, was, as roughly translated, the Buddha’s penultimate sentence. ‘The one who has woken’ (which is what the participle buddha means)...
Only a few months after the first, revelatory, biography of Philip Larkin there come two new lives – whether they are ‘revelatory’ will need pondering – of Michel...
A feast for the Godwinians. First comes the handsome facsimile of the quarto first edition of Political Justice (1793) in the series edited by Jonathan Wordsworth for Woodstock Books. This series...
The Rahman mosque in Aswan is closed to the public. A policeman stands guard on the narrow balcony at the top of the dun-coloured minaret. He sways slowly in the heat. Occasionally he takes a...
Few commended Lord Lane’s handling of the Birmingham Six case, and no one would say he displayed any obvious sympathy for those before him, or an inclination to believe their allegations of police malpractice....
We have read all about Hindu revivalism in newspapers, and seen the pictures on television; one’s personal feelings about it cannot be separated from the information the media give us. When...
Adorno once called his writings Flaschenpost, messages in bottles tossed into the ‘flood of barbarism bursting on Europe’ for the benefit of unknown future readers. The floodwaters...
What makes you think that next time you plug in your brimming kettle boiling water will be produced? I ask, as the sceptic in philosophy always asks, not because I have any specific reason for...
Every so often, poking around in the law’s attic for something you need, you come across a piece of legislation or a report of a case which still has enough grass and twigs sticking to it...
The middle-aged man sat with his head bowed, flattening his face against his palms. ‘Lots of tears, lovely stuff,’ murmured the cameraman. The presiding judge had given us permission...
At the Reformation a world was lost that could never be recovered. The images and altars, the dooms and roods of the parish churches, the towers and cloisters of the religions houses were...
The Seventh Psalm is required in the Book of Common Prayer to be sung or said, in Miles Coverdale’s version, on the evening of Day One of the Church’s calendar: God is a righteous...
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, kept in her New York apartment in the 1870s a stuffed baboon with a copy of The Origin of Species under its arm, along with a platonically...