Thomas Hobbes
William Blake still weaves his mystic spell
Philip Hoare considers the ageless, hypnotic appeal of the painter, poet, visionary and ‘one-man utopia’
Liberty is a loaded word
Just about everyone is for it, but we mean different things by it – whether it be the freedom of independence or the absence of coercive constraint
My fall from grace
I had a bicycle accident last week. Not terrible, but not great either. Of the five I’ve had since I…
An anarchist cri de coeur
Ten years ago, David Graeber was a leading figure of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He and his fellow protesters…
Leap in the dark
‘They all laughed at Christopher Columbus,’ sang my husband flatly, ‘when he said the world was round.’ I wasn’t going…
Rescuing the past from the teeth of time
John Aubrey investigated everything from the workings of the brain, the causation of winds and the origins of Stonehenge to…
Here comes everything
You can’t accuse John Gray of dodging the big questions, or indeed the big answers. His new book The Soul…
David Davis vs Cicero
The MP David Davis has lamented that the British seem to prefer laws that protect their security rather than guard…
The lesser evil
The argument that mankind’s innate violence can only be contained by force of arms may make for a neat paradox, but it fails to convince David Crane
