The end of the last decade has occasioned all manner of reflection on the past ten years, and speculation about the next ten. For my part, I will remember the 2010s as being defined by the culture wars that presently […]
Michael Oakeshott’s The Voice Of Liberal Learning
by on January 14, 2020
It has become fashionable nowadays to speak of the “crisis in higher education,” evident in exploding costs, over-leveraged students and a job market that can seldom justify the high number of graduates with specialties in increasingly esoteric fields. These are […]
E.M. Cioran’s The Trouble With Being Born
by on January 6, 2020
The first month of the new year, of the new decade, even, seems to me the worst possible time to pick up a book by Emil Cioran, whose particular brand of nihilism is pessimistic even by the weighty standards of […]
Leszek Kołakowski’s Is God Happy?
by on December 31, 2019
I ended the year reading a collection of essays by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, whose life spanned not only the two great catastrophes to befall 20th century Poland – the Nazi and Soviet invasions – but the collapse of […]
René Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
by on December 28, 2019
Until his death in 2015, René Girard was one of France’s most illustrious philosophers, whose works encompassed topics as varied as economics and mythology, literary criticism and anthropology, sociology and theology. He was a two-time winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship, […]
Paul Berman’s A Tale Of Two Utopias
by on December 22, 2019
It is my conviction that my generation is growing up within an elaborate experiment, whose parameters we did not choose, whose conclusions cannot be predicted. The authors of this experiment came of age in the 1960s – a decade which […]
Will Self’s The Butt
by on December 17, 2019
Will Self was once the enfant terrible of British letters, a former drug addict turned writer and satirist whose infamy peaked in 1997, when he was caught doing heroin on the private plane of former UK Prime Minister John Major, […]
Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between
by on December 13, 2019
In reading a contemporary autopsy of America’s involvement in Afghanistan, I came across a startling figure: $133 billion – the total amount of money Washington has spent on reconstruction and aid since the commencement of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001. […]
Thomas Sowell’s Migrations And Cultures
by on November 28, 2019
We are only now entering the second decade of the 21st century, but already it seems obvious that the salient force shaping world politics will be human migration. The shrinking populations of the global north have and will continue to […]
Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Years Of Ordeal, 1850-1859
by on November 24, 2019
When we last left off, after the first volume of Joseph Frank’s multi-volume account of the life and times of Fyodor Dostoevsky, our author was on the verge of arrest by the tsar’s secret police for his involvement in an […]
J.M. Coetzee’s The Schooldays Of Jesus
by on November 16, 2019
The Schooldays of Jesus was, for me, an impulse buy, purchased purely on the strength of my esteem for J.M. Coetzee, whom I regard as one of the greatest living fiction writers, but my enthusiasm – at least in this […]
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot
by on October 31, 2019
My Dostoevsky infatuation continues, this time with the second of his major novels, written while he was on the run from creditors, living in Switzerland with his second wife. The Idiot is the only one of Dostoevsky’s novels written while […]
William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days
by on October 20, 2019
To begin with, a confession: I have an abiding fear of the ocean. That fear has not prevented me from swimming in ocean waters – albeit close to the shores – or venturing out in boats of various sizes, either […]
Michel Houellebecq’s Platform
by on September 30, 2019
I am not a superstitious person, nor do I have any faith in the supernatural, but I believe some rare figures throughout history have had the gift of prophecy. Doubtless their fortunetelling owes more to some heightened intellectual sensitivity than […]
Mircea Eliade’s A History Of Religious Ideas (Vol.2)
by on September 26, 2019
For most of my adult life, I have had no use or patience for religion. I was raised outside of the church, never inducted into any religious tradition, and therefore – like so many of my generation – I came […]