There is a current of opinion both among the general public and among psychologists (who can’t so easily be forgiven) that Eysenck is not a serious psychologist. It seems to be felt that his...
Is there or is there not good reason to believe that the experience of being alive is still on the whole improving for the majority of human beings? And if there is, is there good reason to...
Anna G. presents herself to Sigmund Freud in Vienna in 1919 suffering from severe breast and ovary pains, diagnosed as hysterical in origin. We are to suppose that her case not only helped Freud...
This is the first full-scale study of literacy in 16th and 17th-century England. Dr Cressy has long been known to scholars for his work on the subject: here he gives us his conclusions. For the...
Professor Crick’s subject is important and his research has evidently been diligent. We now know a lot more about Orwell than we did, and the increment of knowledge is not always trivial....
Grand-scale massacres and mass suicide performed as a climax to religious observances were a feature of nearly all the ancient civilisations. The descriptions of such happenings, when reported in...
How is it possible to pass so quickly from being an advocate of applied psychoanalysis to being an antagonist of the entire Freudian movement? I wish that process had happened more quickly in my...
Fontana Modern Mastership has by now become so diffuse that the editorial problem may well have shifted from choosing a master who deserves the accolade to finding a biographer to bestow it. Why...
The jacket of The Story of Ruth is adorned with praise from the famous: Edna O’Brien, among others, found it ‘disturbing and quite fascinating’, and Doris Lessing ‘a...
England has never had an official body equivalent to the Académic Française or the Italian Accademia della Crusca. And that is no accident. For the Englishman has scant respect for...
De Tocqueville feared, not for the failure of democracy in America, but for its success: not, like so many of his French contemporaries, for its propensity to release an unbridled égoisme,...
This is not an easy book to read, even though it is written clearly and at times elegantly; its authors have swathed and encumbered their interpretations in so many reservations and second...
By ‘family structure’ many things may be intended. I shall take it here in two senses. First, in the sense of composition of the co-resident domestic group, as the historical...
The topographical tradition is probably stronger in Britain than anywhere, and during the last generation professional and amateur alike have endowed it with a new vitality. In the process, they...
When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge I used sometimes to have tea with the philosopher C.D. Broad, and we would talk about ghosts. Professor Broad lived in Newton’s rooms in Trinity,...
‘We owe much to your country,’ the Anglican archbishop of Uganda told Patrick Marnham shortly before being shot in 1977. ‘We need you, and not just your knowledge; we need your...
‘But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnising Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his...
You don’t have to be Protestant to have the Protestant Ethic, I tell my students, when we come to Weber in my survey course on Sociological Grand Theory. Look at me, I say: Jewish father,...