Like most people with a Polish grandfather. I used to hang around a lot waiting for him to say something wise. Born in 1885, surviving until 1978, he looked, certainly during his last decade,...
It is hardly a new discovery that becoming a parent is full of problems. In every society there have been at least some parents who have had a huge stake in the survival of at least some of their...
Professor Roy Harris’s The Language Makers is the natural starting-point. His book comes oddly naked into the world: we have no statement about the aims or intended audience, no listing or...
Few can still be unaware that 1980 in Britain is as much the Year of the Viking as of forest fires, record interest-rates and the SAS. There is, for once, no ostensible centenary reason for this,...
This is a dictionary of a language that does not yet quite exist. If this seems a paradoxical way to talk of standard modern Chinese, the paradox is easily enough resolved by a brief account of...
We are now well into the Great Vegetable Revolution. ‘For the majority of the population,’ writes Jane Grigson, ‘vegetables as a delight, to be eaten on their own, belong to...
Must social policy be boring? After all, economic policy still keeps people awake while the phoney war between neo-Keynesians and monetarists lasts. Political policy (sit venia verba) continues...
It is not disarming when Professor Dahrendorf writes, in the very first sentence of his Preface: ‘The subject of this volume is simple: what are human societies about?’ And later:...
Frank Parkin calls his challenging book ‘bourgeois’, but it is possible to be more bourgeois about class than Parkin is. Much bourgeois sociology denies the existence of distinct...
‘One theme of this book is that there are significant psychological differences between the sexes.’ The trouble is that from where we are standing the task of distinguishing...
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....
Our technological prophets warn us that the present enthusiasm for sound and picture in communication inevitably heralds a decline not only in the use made of the written word but also of the...
John Searle’s subtitle alludes to the mode of reflection about language which he recommended, and showed in operation, in his earlier book Speech Acts. What the theory of speech acts offers...
An anthropologist friend despairs at his subject. It has, he says, collapsed into the assertion of necessary relations between brothers-in-law and beavers. It is obsessed with classification. He...
I refer to the first of these items as ‘Goldthorpe’ and to the second as ‘Halsey’. Both are productions of the Oxford (Social) Mobility Project, a large collaborative...
Here are nine separate essays on different aspects of the whole construction of Adam Smith’s thought, written originally for separate publication during the past eight or nine years, but...
Modern imaginative literature has two favourite themes: love and crime. Most people accept that love is a mystery full of twists and surprises that are not predictable by science or reason. It is...
No one has ever achieved quite as powerful a position in Psychology as Jean Piaget holds today. His considerable success is due partly to the strength of his massive and comprehensive theory...