December 20, 2008 – 12:37 am
My essay on the idea of global literature appears in the Christmas issue of the New Statesman.
November 27, 2008 – 12:13 pm
On the evening of 20 October this year a memorial service was held at Amherst College, Massachusetts, for the writer David Foster Wallace. Wallace, who graduated from Amherst in 1985, had hanged himself the previous month at his home in California. He was 46.
You can read the rest of my essay about the late David [...]
February 8, 2008 – 9:49 pm
An edited version of this piece about the 1983 Bermondsey by-election appears this week in Time Out.
[UPDATE: The edited, published version is here.]
Nearly twenty-five years ago, in late February 1983, Tariq Ali devoted his ‘Frontlines’ column in Time Out to the by-election campaign then taking place in Bermondsey. Beneath the headline ‘Bigotry and the Bermondsey [...]
September 3, 2007 – 5:59 pm
In The Truce, Primo Levi describes a cruelly protracted train journey, following the liberation of Auschwitz, from Krakow to a transit camp at Katowice in Upper Silesia. When the train makes one of many unexplained stops, at a place called Trzebinia, Levi gets off to stretch his legs. Soon he is surrounded by a group [...]
This piece about Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Edwardian terrorism appears this week in the ‘100 years ago’ issue of Time Out London (link now fixed):
A national newspaper fulminates at the way London has become a safe haven for ‘gangs of assassins’. Foreign governments complain about the readiness of the British to grant asylum to [...]
My brief paean to the glories of the London Library appears in this week’s issue of Time Out London.
Last month, the TV don Tristram Hunt wrote a rather bad-tempered piece for the Guardian complaining about the British Library’s decision to allow undergraduates to use its reading rooms. Hunt said the admission of undergraduates, with their [...]
February 10, 2006 – 6:13 pm
I’ve written the Saturday books essay in tomorrow’s Financial Times. The piece discusses three biographies of philosophers: A.C. Grayling’s Descartes, Anita and Solomon Feferman’s Alfred Tarski and Nicola Lacey’s A Life of H.L.A. Hart.
February 20, 2005 – 7:45 pm
Scott McLemee has a nice article on Harry Frankfurt’s bullshit book here. My piece on the same topic appears in the current issue of Time Out. It’s not available online, so I’m putting it up here.
We all know bullshit when we see it or hear it. And most of us would consider ourselves to be [...]