The ultimate critical virtue, agree many academics, is transgression - social, sexual and political. Theorists such as Judith Butler and Michel Foucault have contributed to a left-wing discourse in which the celebration of deviance has taken over from serious attempts to describe or improve the lot of the oppressed. Scholarly papers extolling the subversive energies cunningly hidden in literary texts or embodied in practices such as body modification, transvestism and [...]

This fascinating yet deeply troubling double biography looks at the lives of the 20th century’s most notorious intellectual double act, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, from the perspective of their sex lives. They rejected the hypocrisy of bourgeois marriage, but the experiment in “free” love that they replaced it with was cold and sordid. A distinction between their “essential” love and merely “contingent” sex with others hid the cruelty [...]

Nicholas Murray describes and reflects on the experiences of an impressively wide range of Victorian travel writers, focusing on the ways in which they presented their travels to the public. As well as providing brief accounts of some of the best-known voyages of the 19th century – including Dr Livingstone’s travels in Africa, Richard Burton in the Middle East, and Darwin on the Beagle – Murray invites the reader to [...]

"Big Brother is watching you." With these words the postwar era began, and in some ways they have come to embody the principal political fear of our time. Worries over identity cards and CCTV are part of a tendency to see surveillance as the means by which power is enforced. The repression in Nineteen Eighty-Four must be resisted. But is our focus on surveillance distracting us from more pressing political [...]

Will there ever again be a public intellectual who commands the attention of so many across the planet? During the Vietnam War, Chomsky’s arguments helped define the responsibilities of the intellectual to society. He has since been an unstinting critic of US foreign policy, exposing in particular the effects of its efforts to oppose socialism in Latin America.

This series of interviews with David Barsamian is a thorough tour of [...]

Readers fretting about Omega-3 deficiency, amino-acid imbalance, or beta-carotene-induced apoplexy won’t find much to feed their anxieties here. Instead, In Defence of Food makes a brave argument about the origins of nutritionism.

Some time in the 1970s, we stopped eating food and started eating nutrients. In 1977, George McGovern led a committee on nutrition that arrived at a simple prescription: eat less meat and dairy produce. This was based on [...]

Of the great English poets, few are so controversial as John Milton. T S Eliot and F R Leavis said his “grand style” lacked precision; feminists accused him of misogyny. Perhaps most offensive to the 21st-century hedonist is his identification with puritanism: Milton is presumed to have despised the body.

This book shows him as a man actively grappling with such issues. In his early Latin poems and his letters, [...]

Since the deaths of Jacques Derrida in 2004 and Jean Baudrillard in 2007, the Slovenian critic Slavoj Zizek has quickly cemented his position as the world's most prominent philosopher and cultural theorist. Like his predecessors, he has divided opinion within the academy, where his belligerent style and cultish following have alienated those not enraptured by his sheer energy. His recent film appearances - in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and [...]

Few jobs attract more envy than that of the food critic: free food, fine wine, and the rest of the day for deliberation and digestion. Trawling various gastrocrats’ attempts to capture the personality of a lobster bisque, it’s clear that much food writing bears little relation to an everyday function.

A A Gill’s Sunday Times column is a worthy exception, taking a refreshingly broad look at food.

His brash [...]

The phone rings. It’s someone from the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, someone called Juliet Solomon. She explains: she’s compiling this book about regrets. It’s for a good cause – could you manage a couple of quick sentences?

You pause. Nothing springs to mind – you’re a relatively successful celebrity, what’s to regret? You’re not Michael Jackson or Madonna, or even Robbie Williams, so you can’t really moan [...]