Tag: authoritarianism
Beyond shame and guilt
When I was a young student and easily impressed by big theory, I was struck by a book by E.R. Dodds called The Greeks and the irrational. Its origin was a series of lectures Dodd gave in California in 1949. Or, going further back, a conversation he’d had, while studying the Parthenon sculptures in the […]
Philip Pullman and the revival of fascism
One of the sweetest memories of reading books to our daughters when they were young was narrating Philip Pullman’s ‘His dark materials trilogy’ to E. in the 1990s, not long after the books were published. One of them, Northern lights, carries a message to E. from the author on its title page. Sometimes I’d continue […]
