Monthly Archives: January 2007

If Minds Had Toes

January 26, 2007 – 6:52 pm

Philosophers have always liked to illuminate problems by making up fictions. Plato compared the situation of ordinary human beings with the predicament of prisoners chained and condemned forever to watch the play of shadows on the wall of a cave. Ever since, vivid analogies or “thought experiments” have been an essential part of the philosopher’s [...]

By Jonathan Derbyshire | Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Frieze books roundup 2006

January 25, 2007 – 9:44 am

The piece about the best books of 2006 that I wrote for Frieze magazine before Christmas is now online – here.

By Jonathan Derbyshire | Posted in General | Comments Off

What’s Left?

January 23, 2007 – 1:40 pm

This interview with Nick Cohen, in which he and I discuss his forthcoming book What’s Left?, appears in the new issue of Time Out (January 24-30; the piece isn’t up on their website yet).
In Ian McEwan’s novel ‘Saturday’, the protagonist Henry Perowne watches as demonstrators gather for the massive anti-war march of February 2003. He [...]

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Imposture

January 13, 2007 – 9:09 pm

My very brief review of Benjamin Markovits’ new novel Imposture appears today in the Financial Times (as far as I can see, they don’t put the “Fiction in Brief” section online):
Benjamin Markovits
IMPOSTURE
Faber, £10.99
Imposture is Benjamin Markovits’ third novel, and it is every bit as polished and ingenious as its predecessors. Indeed, it combines elements of [...]

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The Paris Review Interviews

January 9, 2007 – 4:43 pm

This piece about The Paris Review Interviews, edited by Philip Gourevitch, appears this week in Time Out.
The first issue of The Paris Review, a literary magazine founded by a group of young American exiles in France in 1953, opened with a ‘Letter to an editor’ written by the novelist William Styron. He disdained the usual [...]

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