Noel Malcolm
The Talmudist in the Tower
Ofir Haivry’s study of John Selden, the 17th-century lawyer and polymath who engaged deeply with Jewish legal traditions, is searching and original
The “B” Word
‘Is it too much to suggest that political wisdom may be quite evenly distributed through the population — even among the poor?’
Underrated: George Enescu
We should welcome the belated rediscovery of this neglected giant of 20th-century music
The Pagan Problem In Western Thought
“By all means, let the wicked fry in Hell—but why should they find themselves frying alongside innocent and virtuous pagans?”
The Few Who Rule The Many
Alan Ryan’s colossal new history of political thought is an ambitious but engaging piece of scholarship
Interregnum Interrogator
God’s Instruments is a coherent, elegant collection of essays that confirms Blair Worden as one of our finest historians of the English civil wars
Don’t Mention the War
Book review of The Wartime Journals by Hugh Trevor-Roper; edited by Richard Davenport-Hines
Where the End of History Began
Francis Fukuyama is famous for something he did not say. The book which made him a household name in the early 1990s was entitled, a little too grandiosely, The End of History and the Last Man. Hasty critics took him to be saying that history had come to an end, that Western ideology was now all-powerful, and that therefore there would be no more major conflicts of any kind. With every conflict that erupted after the publication of that book, from ethnic cleansing in Bosnia to the terror campaigns of al-Qaeda, commentators queued up to pour scorn on the naive Japanese-American political scientist who had claimed that nothing like that would ever happen again.
The State of the State
The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life by Kenneth Minogue
The Honorary Ottoman
Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East by Bernard Lewis
Why Remoaners should back Boris
“Boris, ironically, now offers Remoaners the best chance of a soft Brexit, or at least a sensible one. And to those who want a second referendum—’the people’s vote’—there may even be a chance of that too.”
On the road
“In the summer of 1980, in the grip of some Kerouac-ish fantasy, I opted to hitch-hike from Laredo to New York”
Discovering the Great War of China
A third of a million Chinese labourers helped the Allies defeat the Kaiser, but their huge unsung contribution ended in betrayal