The American term “intersection”, what the British call a “crossroads”, is both a practical solution and a hazard. Aided by traffic lights and signage, it allows the flow of traffic travelling in different, non-parallel directions, but the fact that these differing streams have to traverse common space is what gives it a greater element of […]
For those on the political Right, the university is now occupied territory, but not so long ago the universities were an enemy from a Leftist perspective. Terry Eagleton, one of Britain’s most famous Marxist academics, bemoaned in 2010 in Left-wing newspaper The Guardian that we had ‘witnessed in our own time … the death of […]
We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express. A J Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 1936. The English language is a lumber-room of odd artefacts from the past. Indo-Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, the Romance languages; all these […]
I first noticed it 10 years ago while watching a BBC adaptation of Graham Greene’s famous 1938 gangster novel Brighton Rock. Considered a very violent book for its time, it was famously filmed in 1948 as a classic piece of British noir starring a young Richard Attenborough as Pinkie, the hoodlum with the sharp suits […]
Pepper’s Ghost: A Victorian stage-effect by which special lighting and plate glass is used to make illusory objects appear. Campaign speeches are generally just another scene from political theater, and the listener takes away about as much worthwhile information as they would from a sports coach in a pre-game interview. But in August of 2016, […]
The current dismantling of academic Humanities subjects across the West was always going to target philosophy. The charge sheet is by now familiar and reducible to one piece of evidence; Western philosophy was written by White men. This is now all the requirement a discipline requires to be defenestrated. Western philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to […]
