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
At the end of this book there is a story about apples (which I repeat as inconclusive proof that I have fought my way through its five hundred pages). An Inspector from a Northern Police Force is...
On display at the British Museum at present is one of the most brilliant propaganda campaigns ever launched. Something very different from the glossy philistinism of Saatchi and Saatchi...
Imagine a republic that bans commentary, ‘a society, a politics of the primary’ peopled with ‘citizens of the immediate’. In this aesthetic utopia, writer and reader share...
It isn’t hard to see how the idea of an invisible spirit realm, dark and irrational, could be associated with familiar types of womanhood. The idea of a spiritual existence, offering a shadowy, exalted...
When I was an undergraduate at Cornell in the Fifties, it was the only American university where Wittgenstein’s later work was the object of intensive study. He had died in 1951 and
Facts are hard to come by in the Olof Palme case. On the corner of Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan in central Stockholm, at 21 minutes past 11 p.m. on 28 February 1986, the Swedish Prime Minister was...
Connoisseurs of fine ironies will be slapping their thighs at the sight of the Bar and the Government with their teeth sunk in each other’s legs, the former egged on by the judiciary, the...
Big issues and little issues: among established working philosophers there is none more gifted at making us think anew about both than Hilary Putnam. His latest book is motivated by large...
The fountainhead of the world’s two main families of religions was a small Near Eastern people, the Jewish. In the modern world Jews have been prominent among the creators of its arts and...
Of the numerous biographical publications on the most problematic of 20th-century philosophers, Hugo Ott’s Martin Heidegger: Toward his Biography stands out as the most detailed and...
Collaborative writing is necessarily less common in the humanities than in science and medicine. And it seems rather less common now than in the Forties, when I was making a false start in...