It was a Sunday morning, and a minister strode past me with a labrador. ‘That looks like a contented spot,’ he said, dog and dog-collar glistening. I sat in the middle of a little...
In Phaedrus, Plato quotes a story in which the god of writing appears to an early Pharaoh holding his new invention, the hieroglyphic script. The king tells the god to take it away, because it...
A crisp, clear morning, bright and fresh and cold enough to make the flaunting of black anklelength crombies no burden: the perfect day for a funeral. Walking down towards Bethnal Green, through...
My first book is now published. It’s a tragi-comedy about breast cancer. I’ve just got back from America, where I was carrying copies of it around in a beach-bag, trying to sell it to...
The modern social sciences were born out of modern political philosophy. Overtime, those sciences declared their independence one by one from the philosophical tradition, then tried to reshape it...
Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx, they assured us, would be ‘like Galway on a Saturday night’. I assumed this meant the place would be teeming with Irish people, hearty and green,...
It has taken the entire century to bring Freud to the judgment of history. Whatever shall we do about Jung? His beginnings were not promising and his father frankly worried about him. Dominated...
Most psychoanalytic literature is a contemporary version of the etiquette book; improving our internal manners, advising us on our best sexual behaviour (usually called maturity, or mental health...
The lady who has embarked on a campaign to give me serene shoulders, my ‘massoose’ she calls herself, asks me what I do and gets the wrong end of the stick. No, really, I’m not here in search of...
Without the refugees from Nazi Europe American intellectual life would lack weight and reach. It is impossible to conceive of American political thought without Hans Morgenthau, Hannah Arendt or...
At around 9 p.m. on 9 December 1992 Nigel Bartlett was walking down a quiet suburban street near Wood Green in North London when a man began to follow him. The man – Bartlett said he looked...
Peter Gay’s The Cultivation of Hatred completes his Freudian psychoanalysis of the bourgeois 19th century by bringing aggression to bear alongside the forces of sexuality which form the...
Late last autumn this book received a prodigious amount of attention in the United States. No one who has been exposed to any of the American media can have escaped it. Among the reactions was a...
The Report of the Commission on Social Justice, Social Justice: Strategies for National Renewal, is not the first attempt since Beveridge to consider our social security system as a whole –...
In high criticism, Victorianism is generally presented as the artless antonym of modernity. It fades away anywhere between 1901, the year of Victoria’s death, and 1910, the year of the...
Every year I bury one hundred and fifty of my townspeople. Another dozen or two I take to the crematory to be burned. I sell caskets, burial vaults, and urns for the ashes. I have a sideline in...
After all, one can only say something if one has learned to talk. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Children unavoidably treat their parents as though they were experts on life. They,...
When Pasolini, disgusted with the fatted values of post-war capitalism in Italy, was dreaming up an alternative in his late Trilogy, he found the imagery he needed in old collections of stories,...