Bitten by the love geist

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 30 January 1992

Max Scheler had a great deal to say. He would start philosophising, his last wife said, as he dressed. The public lectures which the Chancellor invited him to give in Berlin in 1927 often went on...

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That Old Thing

A.N. Wilson, 30 January 1992

The Pope is the most interesting public figure in the Western world, because, among all the presidents and premiers who exercise power from Washington to the borders of the old Russian Empire, he...

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Changing Places

Avi Shlaim, 9 January 1992

Since its origins at the end of the 19th century, the Jewish-Arab battle for the possession of Palestine has been accompanied by a battle of persuasion to win the hearts and minds of the world....

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Diary: Anita Hill v. Clarence Thomas

Linda Colley, 19 December 1991

To look at, Yale’s Law School resembles a small-scale version of the Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, superimposed on a large mock-Tudor bowling alley. In fact, like most of the...

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Bidding for favours

Nicholas Penny, 19 December 1991

Today the Roman Catholic priest celebrating Mass stands on the far side of the altar, facing the congregation, in accordance with the prescription of the Second Vatican Council of 1963. In doing...

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Free speech for Rupert Murdoch

Stephen Sedley, 19 December 1991

It has taken 12 years of Thatcherism to disrupt the extraordinary complacency of the British about then civil liberties and their constitution. Our constitutional arrangements have never been...

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Poor Man’s Crime

Ian Gilmour, 5 December 1991

Whatever may have happened recently to the Communist regimes Eastern Europe, Marxist historiography seems alive and defiant. Lenin’s tomb may be under threat, but the historical certainties...

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Famous Last Screams

Michael Howard, 5 December 1991

There have never been lacking prophets, from Isaiah onwards, to proclaim the end of war, though the more recent of these have not postulated the Second Coming as a necessary condition for...

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Locke rules

Ian Hacking, 21 November 1991

If it is true, as it seemed to Whitehead, that the whole of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, then it must be equally true that the philosophical writing of the...

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Theory and Truth

Frank Kermode, 21 November 1991

The autumn catalogues of some very enterprising publishers announce as many books as usual under the rubric Literary Criticism, or possibly more, but few have titles of a sort that, even ten...

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Catching up with Sammy

John Lanchester, 21 November 1991

A scene from provincial life: one Saturday about twelve months ago I was sitting in the press box of a football ground in the Midlands. The game had just finished (the home side lost) and I and...

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How have they made it so soon?

John Lloyd, 21 November 1991

A recent interview I had with the chairman of the Russian Central Bank exemplifies the dangerously tense atmosphere within which the politics of the Soviet Union have been conducted since the...

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Blunder around for a while

Richard Rorty, 21 November 1991

For more than forty years, starting with the publication of Ryle’s very influential The Concept of Mind in 1949, some of the best of the analytic philosophers have devoted themselves to the...

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Mr Baker should think again

Mark Bonham-Carter, 24 October 1991

A recent study of the effectiveness of anti-discrimination legislation in the field of employment has proved a puzzle.* Conceived by the Policy Studies Institute in 1987, it was surprisingly...

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Arms and Saddam

Norman Dombey, 24 October 1991

‘I have very high confidence that those nuclear reactors have been thoroughly damaged and will not be effective for quite some number of years,’ General Norman Schwarzkopf said on US...

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Designing criminal policy

David Garland, 10 October 1991

Until relatively recently, criminal justice history was written not by professional historians but by the system’s practitioners – retired prison officials, civil servants,...

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Gnawed by rats, burnt at Oxford

Claire Tomalin, 10 October 1991

George Henry Lewes was a close contemporary of Dickens, born five years after him, in 1817, and dying eight years after him, in 1878. Both men worked themselves to the limits of their strength...

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Communism’s Man of Letters

J.P. Stern, 26 September 1991

He was born György Bernát Löwinger on 13 April 1885 into one of the richest Budapest families. His father, the son of a quilt-maker from southern Hungary, left school at 13, was...

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