Tag: authoritarianism
Welcome back, Benito
On 20 January Donald Trump, having been sworn in at the start of his second term as US President, outlined in his acceptance speech his mission for the next four years. Simply, he would put America first. He blamed ‘the radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens’ for the broken […]
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 […]