Tag: Books and literature

China Nobel Laureate for literature becomes a target in nationalist slander campaign

Amy Hawkins  At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common. But in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valour in cyberspace. Last month a patriotic blogger… Read More China Nobel Laureate for literature becomes a target in nationalist slander campaign

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Who Was Averroes?

Averroes (Ibn Rushd; 1126–1198) was one of the greatest polymaths of the ancient Islamic world, whose practice expanded into philosophy, theology, astronomy, physics, linguistics and more Averroism’, ‘radical Aristotelianism’ and ‘heterodox Aristotelianism’ are nineteenth- and twentieth-century labels for a late thirteenth-century movement among Parisian philosophers whose views were not easily reconcilable with Christian doctrine. The… Read More Who Was Averroes?

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Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility: Lord Acton

Lord Acton writes to Bishop Creighton in a series of letters (1887) concerning the moral problem of writing history about the Inquisition. Acton believes that the same moral standards should be applied to all men, political and religious leaders included, especially since, in his famous phrase, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”: I… Read More Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility: Lord Acton

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A Critic, His Life, His Age: A Tribute to Joseph Frank (1918-2013)

By Gregory Freidin Great musicians, it is said, do not choose their calling—music chooses them. Reading and rereading Joseph Frank’s writings after his passing, it seems that the spirit of modernity itself chose him to be its voice among literary critics—in the age when brute force remaking the world was matched and animated by a… Read More A Critic, His Life, His Age: A Tribute to Joseph Frank (1918-2013)

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How Israel quietly crushed early American Jewish dissent on Palestine

Our Palestine Question, an explosive new book by Geoffrey Levin, delves into American Jewish McCarthyism from the 1950s through late 1970s GAZA casualties live statistics United Nations Documentation on the Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem Debbie Nathan THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT covertly meddled into American Jewish politics from the 1950s to 1970s, and they did… Read More How Israel quietly crushed early American Jewish dissent on Palestine

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Sabry Hafez: the Novel, Politics and Islam – Haydar Haydar’s Banquet for Seaweed

First posted June 07, 2016 The astonishing story of the uproar in Egypt over the publication of a Syrian novel set in Algeria—a work of literature as trigger for political crisis and polemical turmoil, two decades after it was written, in a landscape completely transformed. Haydar Haydar’s fiction as tuning-fork of stark dissonances of time… Read More Sabry Hafez: the Novel, Politics and Islam – Haydar Haydar’s Banquet for Seaweed

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