Food, alone among the sensual pleasures, has always proved a felicitous subject for literature: eating leaves itself open to more varied description than drinking, it is more easily evoked by language than music or art, and it is considerably less embarrassing to read about than sex. Freudians may advocate a psychoanalytical approach to literature, and [...]

With morbid anticipation, the UK media has awaited the death of the 100th British soldier in Afghanistan. On June 8 it happened: three soldiers from the 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment  were killed by a suicide bomber in the south of the country. Quickly, Gordon Brown responded to the grim milestone. ‘They have paid the ultimate price’, [...]

At a seminar loosely arranged around Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, I had the opportunity to discuss Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence, a direct attempt to answer Huntington, with Ibn Warraq (who wrote Why I am not a Muslim). Sen wants to make a big deal out of the Muslim emperor Akhbar of India, [...]

I’ve gone off the new twenty pound notes ever since I got a paper cut from a particularly pristine one. There’s also something slightly unsettling about having Adam Smith on the other side from the Queen: it’s almost a visual representation of the rule of capitalism. It wouldn’t actually be that bad a metaphor for the [...]

Stemming from the first utopian designs for life, most visions of the perfect state of living share the same fatal flaw: the presupposition that there is some underlying rationality in human nature. As I shall explain, any utopia constructed on this optimistic assumption would stand no chance of ever being attained, leaving only the irrational [...]

In his Candide, or: The Optimist Voltaire famously described optimism as the mania to maintain that everything is fine when everything in fact is going badly. Looking at history, one finds that some men have clearly suffered from this manic belief and in our times to be optimistic about the state of the world is [...]

Close your eyes and picture utopia. Does a vision of paradise spring to mind? Or Elysium, maybe? Or possibly you don’t see a physical environment at all, but feel a sense of relaxation and self-fulfilment. These are just some of the ideals our culture projects onto the term ‘utopia’. It has become a concept inextricable from [...]

When asked this question I have several responses. At a personal level I don’t really like being given labels, but then I hate it if anyone gets my name (an important signifier of Identity) wrong, and can also present (or rather, identify) myself in terms of what I think defines me. Some of the elements [...]

Have you ever met a Gulf brat? They are the British expatriates in the more liberal Arab nations, such as the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman.  They are tanned, overdressed and speak in a strange accent which is equal parts Queen’s English and transatlantic twang. This tribe of shrieking, spoilt children is the [...]

Take a moment to prepare yourself for what you are about to read; this is the first and possibly only article ever written by a Northern Irish-Bolivian hybrid. I have a fairly random mix of genes, so I guess us descendants of potato-munchers and cocoa-chewers don’t have a particularly large presence in the world of [...]