Do you think a human life is worth £5,800? That was the upper end of the value placed on an individual African’s life (in today’s money) when compensation for slave ‘property’ was being negotiated in 1833. When emancipation came the year after in the British West Indies, it did not mean freedom. Instead, existing slaves became ‘apprentices’ and in many cases... read more

‘Oh – Vivienne! Was there ever such a torture since life began!’ a dazed Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in 1930 after a typically miserable visit from T S Eliot and his wife. Vivien had been paranoid and cryptic, rambling about hornets under her bed as Tom tried to cover up with ‘longwinded and facetious’ stories, as she wrote to Vanessa Bell. What agony ‘to bear her on ones shoulders,’ Woolf marvelled, ‘biting... read more

There is something inherently ridiculous about a Harvard professor writing a book on the ‘tyranny of merit’. Yet Michael Sandel apparently revels in his trahison des clercs. ‘His lecture tours have taken him across five continents and packed such venues as St Paul’s Cathedral (London), the Sydney Opera House (Australia), and an outdoor stadium in Seoul (S Korea), where 14,000 people came to hear... read more

There’s plenty wrong with rights, Nigel Biggar tells us, as some very powerful thinkers have been saying since the ‘rights of man and of the citizen’ first entered the lexicon of mass democratic politics during the French Revolution. This sceptical tradition has been particularly strong in Britain, a country that likes to think it invented rights at Runnymede. It runs from Edmund Burke, through ... read more

British officialdom was not always attracted to eavesdropping. Viscount Falkland, Charles I’s secretary of state at the start of the Civil War, thought the opening of the letters of the king’s enemies ‘such a violation of the law of nature that no qualification by office could justify a single person in the trespass’ (though, as his friend the Earl of Clarendon recorded, he ‘found means to shift it from himself’). In the late Victorian period, secret intelligence... read more

Samuel Johnson famously remarked, ‘It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know.’ Virginia Woolf politely added that Englishwomen also talk about the weather but thought there should be strict rules attached to all such discussions. A hostess or a novelist might talk about the... read more