Just one more thing. The first three paragraphs of this review of biographies of Rousseau and Voltaire in the Nation. They’re good.

After all, the great battles of the Enlightenment had burned out long before. Religious intolerance and fanaticism were no longer matters of major concern. Indeed, for many of my French fellow students, the great enemy was the Enlightenment itself. Every week they would cram into a crowded lecture hall at the Collège de France to hear Michel Foucault, then in the last year of his life, explain how the eighteenth century saw the imprisoning of the Western world in a straitjacket of mental discipline. They struggled to grasp the quicksilver sentences in which Jacques Derrida deconstructed the

So, another village council in Pakistan is having some fun with the local female population.

A village council in Pakistan has decreed that five young women should be abducted, raped or killed for refusing to honour childhood “marriages”.

Really…what can these people be like? I can’t entirely get my head around it. What can men be like who solemnly get together and decide that five young women should be abducted, raped or killed? Why don’t they embarrass themselves? Why don’t they sicken themselves and each other? I can understand how people can do horrible things in a temper – but this calm cold-blooded judicial-seeming official-like ‘decreeing’ business – this monstrous business of punishing other people – and weaker, more … Read the rest

So now I’ve got one with the big flower or shell-shapes against the glass doors, on my desktop. Mick takes a good picture.

I’ve only just realized there may be another problem with the hacker and the email. My old editor-at-B&W address isn’t working – I assume it’s been disabled with the rest of the email – and it doesn’t tell you it isn’t working. I didn’t know any of this until a few days ago when I sent myself a test mail and used that address (because it comes up first in the address list) – and it never arrived. It didn’t tell me it had failed, it just didn’t arrive. So it’s only now occurred to me that … Read the rest

Gosh, Xmas has come very early this year. Kind Mick Hartley sent me seven blisteringly gorgeous pictures from Kew. Really – when I saw the second I kind of squeaked – the fifth made me exclaim aloud – and the sixth and seventh made my eyes feel all funny. I have to say, I think this is one of the best art ideas of all time. Tracy Emin can keep her old unmade bed; give me Chihuly curled fluted curved shell-like flower-shapes in iridescent colours posed against a pair of glass doors in the Temperate House.

I immediately stuck one on my desktop – looking across the Palm House pond toward the museum, with the glass bobbling things in the … Read the rest

Philip Pullman is eloquent on identity and related subjects. He makes the point that ‘What we do is morally significant. What we are is not.’ Which relates to what I (and other people) keep saying about the religious hatred bill: that religion is not the same kind of thing as race, because it’s not what you are, it’s what you do (and doing includes thinking). Yes, it’s not always easily voluntary, but it’s still not as unchosen as ‘race’ is.

At its extreme, it can lead to a sort of cognitive dissonance, when people claim an inner “identity” that has nothing to do with their actions: “Yes, I murdered my wife and children, but I’m a good person.”…So “being”, in

This is an absolutely horrible story.

She risked torture, imprisonment, perhaps even death to study literature and write poetry in secret under the Taliban. Last week, when she should have been celebrating the success of her first book, Nadia Anjuman was beaten to death in Herat, apparently murdered by her husband…“She was a great poet and intellectual but, like so many Afghan women, she had to follow orders from her husband,” said Nahid Baqi, her best friend at Herat University…Herat, in particular, has seen a number of women burn themselves to death rather than succumb to forced marriages. Anjuman’s movements were being limited by her husband, her friends believe. She had been invited to a ceremony celebrating the return

I saw about fifteen minutes of a thing on tv last night about the Chihuly glass exhibition at Kew. It made me long to be in London and be able to go see it. Really long. Any of you been?

I love – really love – the Palm House and the Temperate House anyway. And with – well, look.

And look. You can see why I want to go.

All of you who can, go, and take pictures, and send them to me for Xmas. Have fun, now.… Read the rest