Gentleman, scholar, acrobat
The Idiot, by Elif Batuman (Jonathan Cape 2017)
There is an old librarian joke about a little girl who returns a book to the library and complains that it told her more about penguins than she had wanted to know. Readers of Elif Batuman’s 2010 book The Possessed are likely to have put the book down feeling much the same about Uzbek literature. Continue reading “Did Anna die for nothing?”
CS Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law, by Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J Watson, Cambridge University Press, 2016 Continue reading “Would CS Lewis vote for Donald Trump?”
Ultimate Questions, by Bryan Magee, Princeton University Press, 2016
An essay written ahead of the 2014 Indian general election. Continue reading “India’s election: the world’s largest question mark”
The Politics of Culture, by Munira Mirza
By promoting diversity through culture, UK policymakers have ignored precisely what makes art so valuable: its universality.
Continue reading “UK cultural policy: using art to divide us”
Equality, Freedom and Religion, by Roger Trigg
A new book attempts to ground a defence of religious freedom in cognitive science, but in doing so it reveals a lack of faith in freedom itself.
Continue reading “Religious belief is more than an evolutionary affliction”
The Bible Now, by Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Western observers with no particular knowledge of Indian politics and society tend to assume the renaming of Indian cities in the 1990s was simply a belated anti-colonialist gesture. Some might even wrongly assume as I once did that ‘Mumbai’ had been an established Indian city before its takeover and mispronunciation by the British. Gyan Prakash’s book is meant as a challenge to more sophisticated misunderstandings than these, but it is equally valuable as an introduction to many of the issues facing modern India, through the story (or rather stories) of its most glamorous city. Continue reading “Yeh hai Bambai meri jaan!”
The Return of the Public, by Dan Hind
Dan Hind’s clarion call for a return of the spirit of the radical political tradition rooted in English republicanism is compromised by his suspicion towards private interests.
Continue reading “A curious plea for a disinterested public”
Taming the Gods: religion and democracy on three continents, by Ian Buruma (Princeton University Press, 2010)
Ian Buruma’s short book is a kind of sequel to Death in Amsterdam, his book about the murder of Theo van Gogh and the limits of tolerance. It goes beneath the superficial counterpositions of today’s religion debates – religion versus secularism, multiculturalism versus intolerance – to identify some more interesting dynamics at work. Perhaps most usefully, Buruma shows that ideological disorientation within Western culture is at least as important as tensions between West and East, or even ‘secular liberalism’ and radical Islam. Continue reading “The politics of secularism”
Dolan Cummings 