The appearance within a few months of each other of two books about the same four women is a bit startling, but on reflection the topic is so natural and interesting that one might even wonder why it hasn’t been treated before. Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot (née Bosanquet), Mary Midgley (née Scrutton) and Iris Murdoch all matriculated… Read More Book review: What is rude?
It is tempting to harness Civilization and Its Discontents as a guide to our contemporary political morass, but doing so may obscure its most valuable message. Civilization and Its Discontents; translated by James Strachey and edited by Samuel Moyn Sigmund Freud was an ambivalent man, especially when it came to politics. He often held conflicting… Read More Udi Greenberg: Freud and the Miseries of Politics
At the height of the tense second phase of the cold war, a group of Stasi majors, propaganda officers and border guards convened at a heavily fortified compound in socialist east Berlin. From spring 1982 until winter 1989, they gathered once every four weeks, from 4pm until 6pm, at the House of Culture inside the… Read More Philip Oltermann – Red poets’ society: the secret history of the Stasi’s book club for spies
Journalist, photographer, author and professor Howard W. French’s Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, is the most recent in a long career of thoughtful and significant literary and journalistic interventions. It demands an account of modernity that reckons with Africa as central to the… Read More Book review: how Africa was central to the making of the modern world
Because of the impact it has already had and because its influence continues to grow, Tom Nairn’s The Break-Up of Britain, first published in 1977, is the most significant book on British politics of the past half-century, even though it is not a famous best-seller. Today, its republication by Verso signals the post-Brexit renewal of… Read More The Break-Up of Britain / The US today resembles the Soviet Union just before it fell
Publishers and other institutions are turning cowardly and brittle when faced with social media frenzies Clanchy appears to have been cast beyond the pale, where there is no room for nuance. But it is evident from the testimony of those who know her that she has done a huge amount of good, championing young people… Read More Sonia Sodha: The hounding of author Kate Clanchy has been a witch-hunt without mercy
Nassim Taleb divides the world and all that’s in it (people, things, institutions, ways of life) into three categories: the fragile, the robust and the antifragile. You are fragile if you avoid disorder and disruption for fear of the mess they might make of your life: you think you are keeping safe, but really you are… Read More Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don't Understand by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – review
I said at the beginning of my first talk that this is not a critical age. It is an age of partisanship and not of detachment, an age in which it is especially difficult to see literary merit in a book with whose conclusions you disagree. Politics – politics in the most general sense –… Read More George Orwell: Literature and Totalitarianism (1941)
NB: I dedicate this post to the memory of Fr Stan Swamy, S.J., (1937-2021), presumed guilty before trial, denied bail and who died in the custody of the state. Rest in Peace Fr Stan. Nothing you did was in vain, nothing forgotten. DS Christ’s depiction in Dostoevsky’s novel ‘The Idiot’ creates layered religious, historiographical and… Read More George Pattison: Human, all-too human? Anastasia Filippovna’s ‘Portrait of Christ’
Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1938 message to Congress warned that when private power becomes stronger than the democratic state itself, we have Fascism. There are many ways to witness the intensifying domination toward a corporate state. One way is to compare exposé books in the 1960s and the present. Within a span of five years, there were three… Read More Ralph Nader: Critical Exposés Everywhere as the Corporate State Worsens
After the truth-shower 