Philosophical reputations come and go – they surge and gutter – according largely to the prevailing intellectual climate, and are only tenuously tied to the actual merits of the views...
J’ai horreur de la foule, admitted Hippolyte Taine, author of the vastly influential and vastly hostile history of the French Revolution which appeared in stages during the 1870s and 1880s....
Rosie Johnston, white and privileged; Edward Johnson, black and poor. For several months between 1986-1987 they shared the experience of imprisonment. Rosie Johnston was to emerge from HMP East...
An energetic thinker with some original ideas may understandably rebel against the oppressive demand to get it right, especially when the demand comes, as it often does, from cautious and...
Robert Wistrich’s book is about the Jews of Vienna in their golden age, Steven Beller’s about the city’s culture in its golden age. You could be forgiven for thinking that these...
Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Renaissance, Humanism – we all break up the past into periods and movements convenient for study, yet it is impossible to understand the Europe of the 15th...
At almost exactly the same time as the Police were fitting up the Guildford Four, Richard Nixon was discovering that a shredder was a far more important piece of equipment than a photocopier....
Just as the Muslim world was vibrating to the ‘insult’ visited on the Prophet Muhamed (Peace Be Upon Him) by an Anglo-Pakistani fictionist of genius and renown, the British and...
On the day Simon Hayward was released from a Swedish prison and returned to England, the Independent reported that a senior official in the Swedish Justice Department had declared himself against...
When asked the question ‘What do you believe?’ I suppose it to mean, first and foremost, ‘Do you believe in God?’ My mind is a blank with regard to this, as to similar...
Joel Steinberg, who maimed his lover Hedda Nussbaum and killed their illegally-adopted daughter Lisa, complained that Lisa was in the habit of staring at him. By the time his murder trial was...
Mary who? was the person I mostly seemed to be dealing with in the early Seventies, when I wrote a biography of the extraordinary woman whose works have now been collected for the first time,...
Alice Thomas Ellis has a delicate touch with her fictional delinquents. In The Birds of the Air, her second novel, Sam, the nearly criminal son of a respectable academic couple, reveals all those...
Ever since the 18th century it has been universally accepted that one of the main foundations of a civilised society is the rule of law. The Enlightenment taught that Nature itself worked by...
Feminists used to know what they wanted. They wanted women to share the rights, the opportunities and as much of a place in the sun as men enjoy. Variations on this agenda were agreed in...
How should the history of the Jews be written? Ever since the compilation of the Old Testament – a pioneering work of collaborative authorship, sometimes inaccurate and inadequately...
Before Stanley Fish started doing what comes naturally, he wrote standard works of literary criticism which dealt, as most such books do, with particular literary figures and periods. Then, in...
In the late afternoon of Wednesday, 28 June, a television channel rang me. Would I say a few words on their news programme about Freddie Ayer? It was the first I heard of his death. Then the