Clik here to view.
BEFORE FACEBOOK WAS THE COFFEE HOUSE
Today it’s Facebook. 350 years ago it was the coffee house. In the late seventeenth century, as Markman Ellis tells in his book on the cultural history of the coffee house, there was panic in British...
View ArticleClik here to view.
ALL THE NEWS THAT WAS FIT TO PRINT
An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times on the panic about fake news: In the past, governments, mainstream institutions and newspapers manipulated news and information....
View ArticleClik here to view.
DECOLONIZING OUR MINDS?
This essay was published in the Observer, 19 February 2017. ‘They Kant be serious!’, spluttered the Daily Mail headline in its most McEnroish tone. ‘PC students demand white philosophers including...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A LITTLE ALTERNATIVE READING
To accompany my essay on the ‘decolonizing our minds’ debate at SOAS, the Observer asked me to compile a (very) short ‘alternative’ philosophy book list; alternative in the sense of being broadly...
View ArticleClik here to view.
NEVER SAY THIS IS THE FINAL ROAD FOR YOU
This week marked the anniversary of the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Ghetto had been established by the Germans in 1940 in the Muranów district of the Polish capital, imprisoning some 400,000...
View ArticleClik here to view.
ON MORALITY AND ITS HISTORY
This is a transcript of a talk I gave at the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. What can the history of morality tell us about the nature of morality? And about ourselves as human beings? These...
View ArticleLIGHT AND GRACE IN ISTANBUL
‘I saw the monuments, the great ancient remains. From every ruin I learned, from every building I absorbed something.’ So wrote Mimar Sinan, perhaps the greatest architect of the premodern Islamic...
View ArticleIN SEARCH OF THE COMMON GOOD
This is a transcript of the RICS Harris lecture that I gave on 14 November 2017 on ‘The public interest and the common good’. The public interest. The public advantage. The public good. The common...
View ArticleBRITAIN AND THE COVERT WAR IN YEMEN 1962-70
This is an extract from Mark Curtis’ superb book Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses. It tells the story of Britain’s secret war in Yemen in the 1960s to restore the monarchy and Saudi...
View ArticleTHE MEANING OF HERITAGE IN AN AGE OF IDENTITY
This is a transcript of my keynote address to the Interpret Europe conference on ‘Heritage and Identity’ held in Kőszeg, Hungary, 23-26 March 2018. The skeleton was discovered in 1903 at Gough’s Cave...
View Article
