Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
These essays cover topics as radically diverse as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Vaclav Havel, The Magic Flute and Viz magazine. All have been published before, and many have already proved controversial. The author, a leading Oakeshott scholar, contributes frequently to the TLS . Witty, moving and erudite, his prose is also conspicuously graceful and clear. This collection is addressed as much to the educated general reader as to the academic specialist. It includes an otherwise almost unobtainable exchange with Sir Isaiah Berlin.
Table of Contents
Conservatism: an outline -- Edmund Burke -- Michael Oakeshott -- The unknown Oakeshott -- Writers and ideology: three case studies. Vâaclav Havel ; Raymond Williams ; Salman Rushdie and the politics of credulity -- The disenchanted flute: opera and the rule of the concept -- On culture -- The politics of sex -- The politics of death -- Culture, technology and value -- Organic society: a note -- Four cheers for normality. Arnold's cultural politics ; The politics of soap ; In defence of Viz ; A voice from the fringe: Jim Rose -- Home truth's: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the house beautiful --Religion, art, and the limits of the sayable -- Statecraft and the metapolitics in Shakespeare -- Jane Austen: ethics and the social order -- Trollope, tact and virtue -- Tolstoy and enlightenment: an exchange with Isaiah Berlin -- Aerodromes and aspidistras: the worlds of thirties fiction -- The survivor's guilt: Wiesel and Sciascia on terror and the Holocaust.