Augustine’s Confessions, though frequently set at the beginning of a line of literary history that leads to Rousseau and Henry Adams, is a narrative of the writer’s life only in a...
The time was 2.30 p.m. on Friday 22 March, the place the top floor of the Washington Hotel, Washington DC. Lined up on the platform in the glare of the television lights were nine elderly men,...
‘Our lives teach us who we are,’ Salman Rushdie observed in one of three widely-read and somewhat contradictory statements of faith that he published last year. These are now...
I shall bite the next person who comes up to me at a party and asks if I’ve read The Journalist and the Murderer. It is not a well-intentioned question. It implies that Ms Malcolm’s...
In the months following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, accusations of appeasement were directed at those who doubted the wisdom of adopting an uncompromisingly hard line towards Saddam Hussein. In...
When I was 14, I had a nightmare. I am standing next to a wall, on the outside of a square enclosure. A man is disappearing around the corner. I pursue him, but before I reach the end of the...
Since the Second World War, the cutting edge of English historical studies has been not ‘world history’ but English local history, a fact by no means adequately reflected in the...
If we need a libel law, then, why do we hate it so? One reason is that the only people who are certain to benefit from the British libel law are the lawyers. I have never been in a libel action without...
‘What is the new world order?’ a Saudi preacher asked me the other day. Order is something the Saudis like the sound of. The world is an entity from which many Saudis are isolated....
‘War,’ said an old peacenik poster with the words scrawled across a child’s drawing of a tree, ‘is harmful to children and other living things.’ This subtle and...
In America, at least, legal realism stripped the law of its pretensions to transcendental purity in the early years of the 20th century. Our legal project consequently turned toward the creation...
There is a wonderful passage in Nietzsche’s Daybreak, about the ageing philosopher. ‘Subject to the illusion of a great moral renewal and rebirth, he passes judgment on the work and...
This is a hard book to read and a harder book to be hard about. It has been received uneasily, mainly by women columnists and women’s page writers who have found it difficult to reconcile...
Roads breed traffic. The M25 motorway round London eased congestion at first, and so tempted more drivers into more journeys. A belief that a good road is empty soon fills it up. Game Theorists...
Intellectual hero to Noel Annan, whose political heroine is Margaret Thatcher, should Isaiah Berlin be left to the – ‘unfashionable’ – enthusiasms of Our Age? Or consigned...
Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was published on 1 November 1790. By then, Burke had long ceased to be the dominant intellectual influence in the Whig Party. He hoped the...
‘The common reproach against me is that I am always asking questions of other people but never express my own views about anything, because there is no wisdom in me; and that is true...
Moral philosophy has not much changed in method since Socrates. Reasons given in support of opinions on moral issues appeal to principles, often about happiness or justice. Opponents of the...