Western civilisation, so this odiously superior little book argues, has outshone all other cultures over the centuries, and has done so largely through its devotion to the "success factors" of Christianity, optimism, science, economic growth, liberalism and individualism. The vulgar entrepreneurialism of the phrase "success factor" is typical of the soundbite style of Suicide of the West. The authors describe the early Christian Church as "downmarket", as if Christ were [...]

Have intellectuals vanished, as Stefan Collini's deftly ambiguous title suggests? Did the distinguished lineage from Voltaire to Bertrand Russell finally die out with the passing of Edward Said? There are, to be sure, many clever people still around; but not all clever people are intellectuals, and not all intellectuals are particularly clever. Academics, broadly speaking, count as intellectuals, given that they trade in ideas; but so-called public intellectuals, those who [...]

''A work of malignant charlatanry" is how Robert Irwin describes Edward Said's Orientalism in this book-length response to that flawed classic. As negative comments on Said go, this is pretty mild stuff. A man whose New York office was once firebombed by Zionists, and whose books were banned in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by Yasser Arafat, was no stranger to waspish, vindictive assaults. In fact, what is striking [...]

Like the rest of us, Tom Paulin is a bundle of contradictions. At its finest, his work is brave, adventurous, original and wonderfully idiosyncratic. Yet he is unable to handle complex ideas, which is something of a drawback for an intellectual, not to speak of a senior Oxford academic. His forte is the gritty image, not the intricate reflection. Few critics can reveal the inner workings of a poem so [...]

I've just returned from a lecture trip to Norway, where I seized the chance to revisit the Arctic Circle. The tiny port of Tromso in the far north, with its magnificent fjord of a harbour, was looking as fresh, raw and vaguely Wild Western as I remembered it. It houses the most northerly university in the world, along with a statue of an extraordinarily scruffy-looking Roald Amundsen, who set off [...]

John Carey is the most drily sardonic of critics, a relentless debunker of pious guff and portentous rhetoric. As a champion of the commonplace and a devout egalitarian, he has waged a ferocious war on cultural snobbery and emotional elitism; and in this bravely iconoclastic book he comes out of retirement from his Oxford chair to fight a fresh battle in the campaign. He also has a sharper social conscience [...]

We think of literature as a set of uniquely individual works, as randomly distributed as the stars. From time to time, however, a critical study comes along that steps back from Dante and Goethe, Balzac and Woolf, and views them, in a powerfully distancing move, as part of a meaningful con- stellation. Such is the virtuoso achievement of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, Georg Lukacs's The Historical Novel and Northop Frye's Anatomy [...]

Packaging complex ideas for popular consumption can be defended on the half-a-loaf principle. A grossly oversimplified grasp of Einstein is better than no grasp at all, just as a fiver is worse than a grand but better than being penniless. If a job is worth doing, as G K Chesterton sagely observed, it's worth doing badly. A blurred photograph of someone, Ludwig Wittgenstein reminded us, is still a photograph. Indeed, [...]

Fellow conspiracy theorists will have noted that the United States has arranged for Michael Jackson's trial to coincide with the aftermath of the Iraqi elections. This surely can't be accidental. Distracting the public from Iraq with a sex-and-celebrity spectacle beats any of Alastair Campbell's crafty synchronies. Actually, the two farces are not all that dissimilar. Both are about American narcissism and egomania, not to speak of the damage to the [...]

The most lethal book on the planet at present is not the Koran, but the Bible. Christian evangelicals have faith that the world will soon come to an end. What they don't see is that it might come to an end because of their faith.

Enlightened liberals, naturally enough, detest this kind of zealotry. But because most of them are disastrously ignorant of theology, they fail to see that right-wing [...]