Professor Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision is two volumes in one, by an author whose interview / lectures I have suggested before. The first part appeared in 1960, the second in 2004. The contents will convey the range of themes. Of especial significance today is his concept of ‘inverted totalitarianism’. Here are a few lines from p… Read More Politics and Vision – By Professor Sheldon Wolin (1922-2015)
An Empire of Ugliness (from The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays, pp 31-42) EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY literature developed the new literary genre of the epistolary novel; I wonder if it would not be legitimate for me to propose now a new form of book review, the epistolary criticism, in which arguments are developed through an exchange of letters… Read More Simon Leys: AN EMPIRE OF UGLINESS (extract from The Hall of Uselessness, 2013)
Arendt shows us “how to think the world anew […] how to hold ourselves accountable for our actions, how to think critically without succumbing to ideology,” Hill writes. “Only when we do this, she says, will we be able to love the world.” The peak of her pariahdom came when she covered Adolf Eichmann’s… Read More Book review – The Philosopher’s Trail: On Samantha Rose Hill’s “Hannah Arendt”
The Middle Ages,” wrote Carl Jung in a 1958 book about ufos, “have not died out… Mythology and magic flourish as ever in our midst.” I doubt if Monica Black, a professor of history at the University of Tennessee and the author of A Demon-Haunted Land,a n intriguing, subtle, and occasionally startling examination of a wave of superstitious… Read More Book review: The sound of silence
Lauded as one of the world’s greatest writers when he died aged 57 in a car crash 20 years ago, Sebald always had a troubled relationship with his father, a German soldier who fought in the second world war, the biography will show His books are saturated with despair. Over and over again, his… Read More Book review: The secret trauma that inspired W.G. Sebald
Two millennia ago, in his Records of the Grand Historian, the Chinese scholar Sima Qian concluded that no empire could be ruled from horseback, and later histories seemed to confirm the view that imperial authority must be vested in cities. The great fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun developed a now familiar theory that “the rulers of a… Read More Book review: Pleasure Domes and Postal Routes – How the Mongols Changed the World
On the Christmas afternoon of 2006, Nao visited me again, accompanied by his son and, to my surprise, volunteered to narrate a new story of Juro, the headhunter. I shelved my linguistic work and sat down with my notebook. He instructed me, to my amusement, to switch on the recorder. He wanted in return a… Read More Anvita Abbi: Ten rare stories and 46 songs of the Great Andamanese
The 45th president is out of office and Michael Wolff has brought his Trump trilogy to a close. First there was Fire and Fury, then there was Siege, now there is Landslide. The third is the best of the three, and that is saying plenty. Three years ago, Trump derided Fire and Fury as fake news and… Read More Book review: Michael Wolff’s third Trump book is his best – and most alarming
The thesis of Macbeth is also the Socratic thesis, set forth especially in the Republic and the Gorgias, that the worst fate that can befall a human soul, far worse than becoming the victim of a tyrant, is to become a tyrant Macbeth is a moral play par excellence. In this, it stands in stark contrast to two more recent… Read More Harry V. Jaffa: Macbeth and the Moral Universe
The world didn’t expect much from Edward Bellamy, a reclusive, tubercular writer who lived with his parents. Yet if he lived small, he dreamed big, and in 1888 he published a phenomenally successful utopian novel, Looking Backward, 2000-1887. It told of a man who fell asleep in 1887 and awoke in 2000 to electrified cities,… Read More Daniel Immerwahr: The Strange, Sad Death of America’s Political Imagination // AV Lecture: How to Hide an Empire
After the truth-shower 