The concession speech by John Kerry and the victory address by President Bush brought home what was lost to America, and indeed the rest of the globe, yesterday. I’m biased (who isn’t), but I thought that Senator Kerry was eloquent in defeat and showed an emotional core that many accused him of lacking. (But I […]

In the wake of Bush’s gobsmacking victory, the insight de jour is that voters (or rather slightly more than 50% of them) ignored the quagmire in Iraq, the unsustainable economic situation, and the general incompetence of the administration, preferring to focus on the issue of the candidates’ “morality” and “character”–secular euphemisms for being religious. Yet […]

The brouhaha over the failure of designate Commission president Jos� Manuel Barroso to form an administration because of objections of MEPs to the appointment of Rocco Buttiglione as European Commissioner for justice and home affairs appears to confirm three trends:1. The growing culture gap between Europe and the US. Buttiglione’s position was considered untenable because […]

It’s been a while since my last post–small matters such as the birth of my son and being the best man at a friend’s wedding have distracted me from the urgent task of broadcasting my views across the blogosphere. On Tuesday, while my wife was focusing on her breathing and trying to survive her contractions, […]

Well, once again my blithe predictions return to haunt me. Alan Hollinghurst has in fact won this year’s Booker prize–actually the only novel on the list that I’ve read so far. To bluntly rehash my previous reservations about this book, it’s not bad, but it’s been ludicrously overrated. If you want to read a novel […]

I’ve just received Gerard Woodword’s “I’ll Go to Bed at Noon” in the post. Just what I need after AL Kennedy’s Paradise: another book about dysfunctional boozehounds. I look forward to sharing my opinions on the novel even if the words in the title above come to mind when I consider its likely fate at […]

I’m within 80 pages of the end of AL Kennedy’s Paradise, a novel narrated by Hannah Luckraft (a name that mingles hope with a presentiment of shipwreck), an alcoholic Scottish woman involved in a self-destructive relationship with a “dissolute dentist” (the fly-leaf’s description) Robert Gardener. It’s certainly not an easy read–as opposed to Consul’s lubricated, […]

In yesterday’s New York Times, Mark C. Taylor mounts a robust defense of Derrida, going as far to claim that:”Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, who died last week in Paris at the age of 74, will be remembered as one of the three most important philosophers of the 20th century. No […]

I was struck more forcibly than I expected when I came across the headline in the New York Times: “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74“. The adjective bestowed on the deceased suggests a certain contempt that Derrida was held in by sections of the Anglophone academy. I remember seeing Derrida lecture to a packed […]