It may surprise those who do not already know it that the world centre for the study of the life and work of Bertrand Russell is at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Shortly before he died...
In the first book that Marx and Engels wrote together, The Holy Family, there is a passage about the Jacobin leader Saint-Just, who was famous not only for the ruthlessness with which he helped...
Most of the gains that women have made over the last decades have come about when women have taken a share of positions and opportunities hitherto reserved, by law or by custom, for men. And it...
I doubt it any reviewer has ever converted anybody to anything. But there have been cases where the reviewer has been won over by the book under consideration. Mrs Besant, reviewing Mme Blavatsky...
At five o’clock on Friday, 19 April, anniversary of the shot heard round the world, Jacques Derrida gave the first of the four annual Frederick Ives Carpenter Lectures at the University of...
The serene face of Michael Faraday radiates from all directions: first in disguised profile on a postage stamp, then more handsomely on the £20 note. Illuminating the dark warrens of the...
There are writers and artists who dislike themselves – who attempt through their work to unearth, refine and then extrude something better than they are, something detached, pure and...
A.J. Ayer began his Bertrand Russell with his customary insouciance, saying that Russell was ‘unique among the philosophers of this century in combining the study of the specialised...
‘I was always surprised and truly amazed that anyone could be attracted by the macabre,’ Dennis Nilsen, the biggest multiple killer in British criminal history, has remarked. He went...
The notion that war can be carried on without crime is as novel, I suppose, as the companion notion that the crime should afterwards be punished by legal process: the first idea has encouraged...
Whatever, you may be wondering, became of the mind-body problem? This new collection of Colin McGinn’s philosophical papers is as good a place to find out as any I know of. Published over a...
About Rousseau, as about Romanticism, it is tempting to use the word ‘disorderly’. Maurice Cranston showed us in the first volume of this, the most masterly of biographies how he had...
Mayor Ron Nachman has some dramatic photographs of the last Scud attack on Tel Aviv. He wants to show them to me; he wants me to understand what they mean. ‘Come and look at this,’ he...
Everybody, pretty well, says that the Authorised Version of the Bible is a national and more than national treasure, never to be surpassed. And yet everyone we listen to, down to those who read...
Perez Zagorin’s suggestion that the 16th and early 17th centuries, the era which encompassed the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, might aptly be described as the Age of...
The Duke of Wellington, defending the Lord Chancellor of Ireland for distributing lucrative posts among his family, complained of the ‘senseless outcry against public men for not having...
Milan Kundera writes novels, but are they philosophy or fiction? Kundera himself (in an interview collected in The Art of Novel) finds the comparison with philosophy ‘inappropriate’:...
I have not met Max Wright, but a few years ago I read two chapters of a book he was writing about the Plymouth Brethren. I thought highly of the script and looked forward to hearing how it was...