Are our dealings with nature sustainable? Can we expect world economic growth to continue for the foreseeable future? Should we be confident that our knowledge and skills will increase in ways...
Defending New Labour in the Observer a few weeks ago, David Aaronovitch identified a sinister world of privilege, prejudice and plotting, where short-sighted, soi-disant left-wing opponents of...
Better to wonder if ten thousand angels Could waltz on the head of a pin And not feel crowded than to wonder if now’s the time for the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire To teach the...
When I was young people didn’t die and they didn’t pass away. They certainly didn’t expire, or perish, though there was a woman in our street called Hazel who dabbled in...
‘It is, and is not,’ Ezra Pound wrote in a short poem called ‘Sub Mare’, ‘I am sane enough.’ What ‘is, and is not’ is the eerie landscape of the...
In January 1866, on a bitterly cold night, a man dressed in ragged clothes begged for a night’s lodging in the male casual ward of Lambeth workhouse. On entering, he was made to strip and...
Ever since Mary Douglas’s anthropological foray into the laws of impurity in Leviticus in Purity and Danger (1966), her work on the Bible has been constantly stimulating and, at its best,...
Almost everything I’ve ever done has very rapidly become normal. It’s the way human beings tend. ‘Adaptation’, they call it. Once I lived with a heroin addict in a...
Malingering, the OED tells us, is something originally done by the armed forces: ‘To pretend illness, or to produce or protract illness, in order to escape duty; said esp. of soldiers and...
In 2002, incoming students at the University of North Carolina were required to read Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations by Michael Sells, a translation into English of 35 of the...
Where does it stop? The events at Abu Ghraib prison show no signs of vanishing into historical inertia. On the contrary, they seem to be replicating themselves throughout the defenceless body...
Dryden and D’Avenant’s debonair travesty of The Tempest pairs the innocent heroine, Dorinda, with Hippolito, a male juvenile lead of equal springtime guilelessness. While Miranda...
There is in the Louvre a diorite stela from the 18th century BC, on which are inscribed the 282 laws of the Code of Hammurabi: pretty much the earliest recorded set of laws we have (centuries...
Sancho Panza fancied himself a wine connoisseur of rare ability. Challenged on his claim to have a ‘great natural instinct in judging wines’, he assured a sceptic that you ‘have...
I am Dr Kinsey from Indiana University, and I’m making a study of sex behaviour. Can I buy you a drink? In a simple attic room, with only a mattress on the pine floor, two people would...
Mosul, said by some to be modern Iraq’s second and by others its third most populous city, was originally awarded to France as part of Syria under the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement....
It’s not every day that the soccer tifosi, those hardcore empiricists, come face to face with a well nigh theoretical observation to the effect that ‘football matches are...
Stanley Milgram’s series of experiments to find out how far individuals would go to obey authority are legendary. Conducted in New Haven, Connecticut in 1961, they have been cited in...