John Kenneth Galbraith once said that artists know nothing about economics, and economists know nothing about art, so they will have little to say to each other. The same remark might be made about economists and literary scholars

  Sculpture of Machiavelli for the Uffizi © Adam Eastland/Alamy TLS - Machiavelli’s Utopia WILLIAM J. CONNELL “Machiavelli’s Utopia” might be thought to refer to a book which, like Utopia itself, never existed. Thomas More wrote Utopia; Niccolò Machiavelli did not. Machiavelli’s The Prince, moreover, is a book sometimes thought to describe a dystopia. All …

Continue reading TLS – Machiavelli’s Utopia

"My job is to rattle the bars”, says the devil in the opening poem of Edwin Morgan’s sequence Demon (from his collection Cathures, 2002), something that Morgan himself was happy to do throughout his long career. He was born in 1920 and published his first collection of poems in 1952. It was his second – The Second Life (1968) – …

Continue reading Poem of the Week: ‘The Demon at the Walls of Time’ – TLS

From The Times Literary Supplement (December 2007) Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of structuralism, owed much to Hobbes and Mill, and numbered Henry VII among his ancestors John E. Joseph As he lay dying, in 1913, of arteriosclerosis and influenza, still a lethal combination today, Ferdinand de Saussure must have been sure that, come the …

Continue reading The poet who could smell vowels

Al Gore got stuck on a scissor lift. Studio execs fell asleep at a screening. And everybody hated the title. The amazing true story of the most improbable — and important — film of our time. A Decade ago, climate change was a huge problem with a small audience. Unless you were among a handful …

Continue reading An Oral History of “An Inconvenient Truth” | Grist