Articles

Dog-races, football pools, Woolworth’s, the pictures, Gracie Fields, Wall’s ice cream, potato crisps, Celanese stockings, dart-boards, pin-tables, cigarettes, cups of tea, and Saturday evenings in the four ale bar.[1] This rapid-fire enumeration of distinctive features of Englishness, one of George Orwell’s recurring party-tricks, seems today a tall order. What is it to be English? Those like Tory MP Robert Jenrick rely on inane tautologies: English identity is simply English

Art has been part of our being for millions of years—possibly even before the beginning of our genus Homo—without being understood as what we now call art. From the beginning, it was simply another way of knowing, probably our first, of coping with what confronted us in our environment as a necessary way of surviving in it and sharing that knowledge with others. It sprang from an emotional reaction to what existed outside of us and how we translated that feeling to pass it on

Blue and white, occasionally with touches of yellow, ceramic tiles adorn not simply the façades and interiors of countless Portuguese...

Convince an enemy, convince him that he’s wrong Is to win a bloodless battle where victory is long A simple act of faith, in reason over...

Carved into the stone of the ancient temple of Apollo at Delphi was the injunction to ‘know thyself’. Without such knowledge we are...

I. Introduction Jonathan Sumption—once described by The Guardian  as ‘the brain of Britain’—is a professional historian and former...

When is an artwork finished?   Ann Landi, a contributing Editor of ARTnews , wrote an article that explored the question of when an...

Peter Krausz was born in Romania in 1946. He studied mural painting from 1964 to 1969 at the Bucharest Institute of Fine Arts. Since 1970, he has made Montreal his home. His diverse artistic production includes painting, drawing, installation, and photography. From 1980 to 1990, he was the curator of the Saidye Bronfman Centre Art Gallery and a teacher at Concordia University. In 1991, he joined the faculty at the University of Montreal where he is now a tenured Professor of

The book is a simple yet complex idea that has profound influence on culture, society, and religion that transcends time and civilization. The book is a platform or foundation for the study of the Humanities because it has so much power over the course of human life. The impact of books and the knowledge contained dictates human history, influences religious and political policy, supports the powerful, and inspires the repressed. In early book creation the relationship betwee

Most first novels are emotionally explosive, going to the heart of the individual. Novelist Paul Pickering changed from journalism to...

We are the Restitution Study Group (RSG), a New York-based non-profit founded in 2000 to campaign for innovative approaches to healing...

As a field of scholarship and practice, Transitional Justice (TJ) has become the dominant framework through which to consider ‘justice’ in periods of political transition ever since the end of the Cold War.[1] Understood here as ‘the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation’,[2] TJ systems are founded on the

Amitav Acharya is the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and Distinguished Professor at the School of International...

Each year, The Economist publishes a Democracy Index. The 2022 edition listed 167 countries ranked on metrics of five dimensions: electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture, and civil liberties. The US ranked 26th in the world. At the top of the list were Norway, New Zealand, Finland, and Sweden. At the bottom were North Korea, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. No real surprises there, but Taiwan (8), Uruguay

Karl Heinz Bohrer’s A Little Pleasure in Decline. Essays on Britain. [1] My friend Karl Heinz Bohrer died on 4 August 2021. He was seen...

Introduction The work of many 17th-18th century thinkers on politics and society continues to shape modern discourse, with notable contributions including Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750). The renown enjoyed by a small number of thinkers should not, however, divert us from more obscure but equally significant works from the period. The Anglo-Dutch crit

The Estonian flag is a blue-black-white tricolour. Or at least it should be. As a foreign correspondent in 1990, I was puzzled to see...

Introduction Law centres are providers of legal aid and have been in existence since the early 1970s. Their main role has been to assist those that reside within their local communities. They specialise predominantly in social welfare or ‘poverty’ law as their legal representatives possess detailed knowledge about the problems their local residents face. This article is divided into timeframes and will consider the development of law centres in the UK from 1945 to 2021. Betwe

Introduction Gamal Abdel Nasser savoured the moment: it is 26 July 1956 and he has just announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal....

Had any of the players who competed for the inaugural tennis grand slam of 2022 in Melbourne been complete (i.e. sovereign,...

On Monday 15 April, a fire broke out in the Notre-Dame de Paris. Believers and tourists were invited to leave the cathedral immediately. A race against time was launched which would last more than fifteen hours, defying all human bravery to save the Notre-Dame. Thousands of people gathered around the cathedral this evening to reflect, pray, and witness this catastrophe which none had thought possible to an eight-century old lady that had accompanied people in their joys and s

On 12 January 2022, there was an attempt to destroy, or at least damage, the statue of Prospero and Ariel installed outside the BBC’s...

In law schools as well as political science and history classes, students are generally taught that when the Supreme Court decides a constitutional issue it delivers the final word unless the Court changes its position. That is the prominent theory. In 1953, Justice Robert Jackson promoted the doctrine of judicial finality by making a statement that is often cited: ‘We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final’.[1] Perhaps a clev

I became an atheist at the age of eight. After one of my Hebrew-school teachers devoted a 90-minute class to recounting her experiences...