Monthly Archives: June 2009

How the left lost its language

June 28, 2009 – 3:38 pm

From last week’s New Statesman:
Fifty years ago, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote a rather gloomy essay about the state of the “socialist movement” in Britain. There was, she said, a “moral void in the life of the country”, and on the left in particular. Where the left had once been the source of [...]

By Jonathan Derbyshire | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Public philosophy

June 6, 2009 – 12:42 pm

Urban legend has it that the man chosen by the BBC to deliver this year’s Reith Lectures was the real-world inspiration for a character in The Simpsons. Montgomery Burns, the desiccated and occasionally malevolent owner of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, is said to have been modelled, in his phy­sical characteristics if nothing else, on [...]

By Jonathan Derbyshire | Posted in General | Comments (0)