Philosophy
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A trenchant study of how anger and violence have influenced modern societies will have you fearing the worst
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From film to philosophy, from music to history and economics, masters of their crafts pick the five books they could not live without
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The philosopher’s laconic, lyrical memoir displays an unsettling yet wholly inspirational vigour in the face of life-threatening disease
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From AJ Lees’s extraordinary memoir Mentored By a Madman to Fiona Melrose’s Midwinter and Julie Myerson’s chiller The Stopped Heart, our critics recommend the reads that slipped under the radar
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Paula Hawkins reflects on guilt, Jackie Kay seeks hope post-Brexit, and David Nicholls is lured into the lonely city … writers pick their best books of 2016
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Nearly 20-year-old prediction by a late leftwing philosopher, widely shared since the election, foresaw the rise of a Trump-like ‘strongman’
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The original self-help manual on American life – with its influence stretching from the Great Depression to Donald Trump – has a lot to answer for
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Utopia has inspired generations of thinkers and writers to imagine the good – and evil – humans might be capable of. China Miéville rereads a classic
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As BBC4 kills the hipster stone dead with a documentary that’s a decade late, we offer the commissioners some tribes to investigate for 2026 – from protein shake addicts to self-admiring members of the alt right
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Greenfield considers the brain processes behind the experience of a single day – as ‘you’ work, engage in fantasies, walk the dog, and so on. But is it an exercise worth doing?
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News that philosopher Charles Taylor has scooped $1m for the inaugural Berggruen prize is the latest sign of a rise in big-payout humanities awards
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What the critics thought of Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow; The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shukla; and Holding by Graham Norton
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From Michel Houellebecq to Simone de Beauvoir, novelist Tommy Wieringa chooses stories of men who have tried to reach beyond what is possible
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The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific concepts
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The Austrian-born philosopher’s postwar rallying cry for western liberal democracy was hugely influential in the 1960s
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After the breakup of a long relationship, the magician found himself pondering how to be happy – and he’s found that it’s simply a trick of the mind
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Karl Marx’s true dreams and the ideology that bears his name are very different things, according to this exhaustive biography
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The great historian of ideas starts with an animal parable and ends, via a dissection of Tolstoy’s work, in an existential system of thought
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Why do we like what we like – this band or that ice-cream flavour? Is it biological or cultural? And what role do Amazon and Netflix play in shaping our preferences?
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From Marx to Mann and Adorno, some thinkers have made brilliant use of the imaginative techniques of novels and stories to frame their reflections. Here are some of the most interesting and unexpected
Social equality Porn with purpose: why retrofitting social responsibility never works in business