Psychoanalysis is a conversation that enables people to understand what stops them having the kinds of conversation they want. But as the unconscious and sexuality have gradually been replaced by...
Bait them and the Derrideans certainly rise. When the English version of Derrida’s Glas appeared last year in the United States*, I wrote a griping review of it, to regret mainly that a...
In the opening act of The Marriage of Figaro the music master Don Basilio twits Susanna with the absurdity of her sexual tastes. How odd not to prefer, as anyone else would do, the favours of a
The rubric at the start of this remarkable volume is encouraging: ‘Everything in this book is true. No names have been changed, there are ... no invented scenes or dialogue.’ On the...
Nothing so exposes the levels of hypocrisy in our society as the Stalker case. This cause célèbre has turned an unknown policeman into a household symbol of integrity and innocence in...
In the autumn of 1982 three policemen in Northern Ireland were killed by a landmine planted by the IRA. At once, the Royal Ulster Constabulary plotted their revenge. Acting on information...
Not until the 18th century did ordinary Europeans discover America. New World staples flooded into their homes, fibres, sugar, tobacco, affordable consumer items that made their lives a little...
In the Preface to his new book Richard Wollheim tells how he ‘evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time-consuming and deeply rewarding’. He looked at them for a...
On 22 December 1984, Bernard Goetz got into a subway car in New York City and sat down at the back with four young blacks. Wondering what this ‘white dude’ was up to, they teasingly...
George Santayana made himself anything but plain in his writings. Even when he was memorably, aphoristically direct, he toyed with the contrary, the piquing, the enigmatic, the confounding, and...
This is the first half of a survey of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The division into two quite slim volumes does not mean that Professor Pears accepts a received view: that the man had two...
This summer some five hundred bishops of the Anglican Communion will converge on Canterbury. They will have come to attend the 12th Lambeth Conference – as these gatherings are still...
‘I thought I had best begin by expressing some old-buffer prejudices in general,’ Empson told the British Society of Aesthetics in 1961: ‘but now I will turn to English...
The university discipline we now call ‘English Literature’ is a Scottish invention. Though he had already given his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belies Lettres in Edinburgh, it was at...
Among Hugh Trevor-Roper’s historical interests it is the Early Modern period, from the late Renaissance to the Baroque, that has claimed his most distinctive literary form, the long essay....
The state of elementary, intermediate and higher education in America has been a serious cause for concern in recent years. Diverse groups and individuals have issued scathing reports on the low...
Martin Chuzzlewit, in the Dickens novel, crosses the Atlantic in a packet boat. When it reaches New York, newsboys come aboard shouting out the latest in their papers: the New York Sewer, the
The history of thinking about political institutions and political behaviour has for two millennia oscillated between two opposed poles. Realists have seen politics in defensive terms: human...