A Mr Jay, of Nettlecombe, near Watchet, Somerset, wrote c. 1670 an essay modestly entitled ‘A Fool’s Bolt soon shott at Stonage’ (i.e. Stonehenge). It begins: A Wander Wilt of...
A few years ago, we discovered we were interested in the same problem, in very different periods of history. The problem is why sexuality has become so important to people as a definition of themselves.
This might have been the autobiography of the present Archbishop of Paris. It caused some sensation when it first appeared in French in 1978. The author is an Israeli historian and political...
Alan Macfarlane likes to shock historians out of their complacency and out of a narrow preoccupation with their own period or their own mode of historical study. He is a professionally-trained...
Train-robber Biggs and murderer Boyle present in their testaments a challenge to our moral reflexes. Both authors have appalling records: South Londoner Biggs with countless petty interviews,...
‘Is it easy to be a Marxist?’ Louis Althusser put this question to a crowded audience at the University of Picardy in 1975. Is it possible to be an Althusserian? The question has to...
It is no secret that philosophy as it is taught and studied at UCLA or Princeton or Oxford is very different from philosophy as it is understood at Paris or Dijon or Nice. An intellectual milieu...
A family listening as their father reads them the Bible; a philosopher poring over a book; an artist, who turns his back on us as he draws; a secretary absorbed in taking dictation, and another...
Generalising across the arts is a tricky business. Can we really expect to find anything in common between, say, Ulysses, Der Rosenkavalier, the ‘Donna Velata’ and Donatello’s...
This peculiar book belongs to a series called ‘Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Polities’, but one should not be misled by the name either of the series or of the book:...
Professor Van Fraassen’s book is a recent addition to the Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy which Mr Jonathan Cohen is editing for the Oxford University Press. Its aim, as expressed...
Edward Norman’s Reith Lectures reminded a surprised audience that His Kingdom is not of This World, and hinted that there was more than a little that was bogus about Third World theologians...
Until a comparatively short time ago most books purporting to deal with Greek mythology were content only to relate the myths, fighting shy of any attempt to explain that part of their...
For those too young – or too old – to remember, Mandy Rice-Davies had a walk-on part in the Great Profumo Scandal of 1963. Now she has published a racily ghosted autobiography. It...
Professor Hexter made his mark in the learned world over forty years ago with an article in the American Historical Review called ‘The Problem of the Presbyterian Independents’. He...
The carefully contrived piece of political theatre that opened in Peking in November, ran almost to the New Year, and ended off-stage in January with a wrangle between the producers over the...
In the huge amount of writing left by Wittgenstein there often occur notes that do not belong directly to his treatment of particular philosophical problems. The notes pertain to a wide variety...
Russell and Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Sartre are dead, and it looks as if there are no great philosophers left alive. At the end of his book, Alan Sheridan hesitantly stakes a claim for...