Modern Discontent

Bernard Williams, 17 July 1980

All around him in American society Lasch sees intellectual and moral feebleness, cultural decay, despair and inner rage. There is no personal love, only a snatching at gratification, or domestic...

Read more about Modern Discontent

Necessary Bishop

John Robinson, 3 July 1980

From time to time, clergymen of the Church of England attain notoriety by reason of the fact that they stick out to the left or the right or ahead of their contemporaries. They are the glory, the...

Read more about Necessary Bishop

Bloom’s Gnovel

Marilyn Butler, 3 July 1980

Harold Bloom of Yale has become strangely hard to avoid. Eloquent, prolific, charismatic, he is unmistakably one of the leading living mandarins of literary criticism. His manner of writing has...

Read more about Bloom’s Gnovel

Trashing the Supreme Court

Ronald Dworkin, 19 June 1980

This is a great best-seller in America. But it is a deplorable book – mostly silly gossip about the various Justices of the United States Supreme Court in the period from 1969 to 1976,...

Read more about Trashing the Supreme Court

Exact Walking

Christopher Hill, 19 June 1980

In 16th-century England Protestant theology was overwhelmingly predestinarian. ‘Calvinist’ is the word normally used, but Dr Kendall, as we shall see, is unhappy about it. Bishops...

Read more about Exact Walking

This, the companion volume to The Discipline of Law, completes Lord Denning’s current legal testament – his witness, until his next book, to the cause of justice. He writes on...

Read more about Leslie Scarman writes in praise of a dynamic judge

Animal Happiness

Brigid Brophy, 5 June 1980

You possess two pain-killing injections and you encounter two casualties of an earthquake. Should you administer a shot apiece or give both to the person in the worse pain? Alternatively, you...

Read more about Animal Happiness

Meyer Schapiro’s Mousetrap

Gabriel Josipovici, 5 June 1980

I have always thought that there was a striking resemblance between Freud’s earliest case histories, which he published as Studies in Hysteria, and the Sherlock Holmes stories. In the

Read more about Meyer Schapiro’s Mousetrap

The concerns of academic philosophy are to some degree the concerns of everybody. At the same time, they often appear to plain pre-philosophical men and women – including those perhaps not...

Read more about Alasdair MacIntyre on the claims of philosophy

No scientist worth his research grant really wants to conceal his discoveries from the world at large. Many non-scientists are curious to know something of the latest scientific discoveries....

Read more about John Ziman on the true enchantment of physics

Ireland’s Invisibilities

Owen Dudley Edwards, 15 May 1980

Dr R.B. McDowell knows and tells far too many relevant good stories to require the enhancement of his prose by specimens of the ‘Irish bulls’ of Sir Boyle Roche, who single-handedly...

Read more about Ireland’s Invisibilities

High Time for Reform

Rosalind Mitchison, 1 May 1980

There are two interwoven stories here. One is the ostensible one of the activities and developing ideas of the various radicals, seen during the years in which these men reached some...

Read more about High Time for Reform

Jon Elster’s Brisk Meditations

Bernard Williams, 1 May 1980

There are some pieces of logical or theoretical jargon which are marks of ideological allegiance – intellectual windsocks to display which way the wind is blowing the author. While...

Read more about Jon Elster’s Brisk Meditations

Law and Class

Francis Bennion, 1 May 1980

Roger King and Neill Nugent assemble material by which they seek to persuade us that there is such a thing as the middle class, and that in the 1970s, by use of legal process, it staged a revolt....

Read more about Law and Class

Elizabethan Spirits

William Empson, 17 April 1980

Something badly needed has got left out from the great structure that Dame Frances Yates has been building as an exposition of her view of the Occult tradition. I have felt it since her book on...

Read more about Elizabethan Spirits

Ayer, Anscombe and Empiricism

Alasdair MacIntyre, 17 April 1980

Locke, Berkeley and Hume were three very different philosophers with very different preoccupations, modes of argument and attitudes towards the world. But by the middle of the 19th century it had...

Read more about Ayer, Anscombe and Empiricism

Christianity’s Doppelgänger

C.H. Roberts, 17 April 1980

In December 1945 an Egyptian peasant from the village of Al-Qasr in Upper Egypt stumbled across a large jar buried in the soil of an ancient site. It proved to contain, not the treasure he had...

Read more about Christianity’s Doppelgänger

Jim and Pedro

Geoffrey Best, 17 April 1980

The self-effacing authors of this excellent book aim to contribute some clear-headedness and penetration to what ought to be our great debate, but is too often our puzzle-headed mumble, about...

Read more about Jim and Pedro