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