Civilisation
Notes on sounds and tones
Is music expressing or evoking emotion?
The cheerful pessimist
Recalling Gertrude Himmelfarb, historian and Standpoint advisory board member
Honour and courage
Tom Stoppard’s roots and Caryl Churchill’s dystopia
Frayed cassocks
A book by Coleridge published in 1830 offers useful advice for perplexed Anglicans today
A maestro of detail long before Leonardo
How Jan van Eyck changed the trajectory of Western art
Dangerous tribes
A chilling, compulsive investigation into online extremist groups
Lapine revelation
Karen Harvey’s book on the ‘rabbit-breeder’ Mary Toft teases out the painful emotional drama behind an 18th-century medical hoax
Life and the living
The mysticism and pragmatism of Victorian philosopher-psychologist William James
A harness for history
Thomas Piketty is haunted by the failures of social democracy, but his own ideas for fixing society are far from novel
A hunger for the truth
A film about the the Holodomor’s exposure should prompt debate on the famine-denialist Walter Duranty
Will the green agenda be killed off by the pandemic?
‘Will the green agenda be killed off by the longer-term coronavirus recovery? Or might the closure of so much business, and the cleaner air that results from planes not flying and factories not working, give us extra years to gain control of our environment?’
Why T.S. Eliot still matters
His contemporaries’ reputations have diminished. But Eliot’s has grown: he is the poet who shows us what can be saved from the ruins
Music’s in the house
Rappers have found a role in lockdown: chronicling coronavirus with topical tunes. Most people, though, are rushing to the safety of the past