Terry Eagleton's Blog, page 7

Review: Enlightening by Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin's letters show that he was in a chattering class all of his own, says Terry Eagleton

The child of Hasidic Jews who fled Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, Isaiah Berlin spent the rest of his days in an Oxford that might have been purpose-built for him. Oxford is one of the great hubs of the British establishment, but prefers to see itself as a haven for free spirits and flamboyant individualists. A don might endure the inconvenience of standing for hours in a pub with a...

Terry Eagleton: The liberal supremacists

Whether they like it or not, Dawkins, Amis, Hitchens and company have become weapons in the war on terror

One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies. This, surely, is the acid test of any liberal creed. Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant. A community of the broad-minded is a pleasant place...

Terry Eagleton: Milton's republic

Our great dissident poet, born 400 years ago today, did more than just hymn the praises of revolt

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. The two intersect only in such absurd anomalies as the poet laureateship. But whereas Andrew Motion does his bit to keep the monarchy in business, one of the greatest of English poets played his part in subverting it. John Milton, who was born in Cheapside 400 years ago today, published a...

Review: The House of Wittgenstein by Alexander Waugh

Terry Eagleton on a gripping account of the Wittgenstein madhouse

The Wittgensteins, ensconced in their grand Winter Palace in fin-de-siècle Vienna, were hardly a model family. The father, Karl , was a brutal autocrat as well as a high-class crook. He was an engineer by vocation, and his son Ludwig would later do some original work in aeronautics at Manchester University. A fabulously wealthy steel magnate, Karl rigged prices, bleeding his workers dry and doing much the same to his timorous...

Review: Between the Monster and the Saint by Richard Holloway

A retired bishop's homespun, middlebrow wisdom frustrates Terry Eagleton

Some years ago, an Anglican bishop was asked on television how he would deal with a young couple who were having sex outside marriage. "Well, I wouldn't want to condemn them," he said. "Instead, I'd like to get alongside them." It is a wonderful self-parody of Anglican attitudes: gentle, unworldly, non-doctrinaire, comic in its earnest high-mindedness. One takes it the bishop would be rather more ready to condemn the...

Review: America America by Ethan Canin

American fiction is riven by a conflict between innocence and experience. From James's Isabel Archer to Faulkner's Joe Christmas, Salinger's Holden Caulfield to Benjamin Braddock of The Graduate, a guileless character runs up against a corrupt world. Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic. Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do.

In F...

Terry Eagleton: Culture conundrum

The age-old conflict between civilisation and barbarism has lately taken an ominous turn

This year sees the 20th anniversary of the death of Raymond Williams, one of the towering socialist thinkers of the past century. A superb biography - Raymond Williams: A Warrior's Tale - has just been published by Dai Smith. He charts Williams's passage from the Welsh border country, where his father was a railway signalman, to Cambridge and then adult education, a vocation he chose, along with New Left c...

Review: The Secret Life of Poems: A Poetry Primer by Tom Paulin

Literature Terry Eagleton spots a familiar political agenda in a passionate account of poetry

The Secret Life of Poems: A Poetry Primer
by Tom Paulin
320pp, Faber, £17.99

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will. Besides, unlike Sense and Sensibility, Paradise Lost hasn't been on television. With fiction...

Review: Graham Greene - A Life in Letters edited by Richard Greene

Terry Eagleton finds an extraordinary career and peripatetic life revealed in Richard Greene's collection of Graham Greene's letters

Graham Greene: A Life in Letters
edited by Richard Greene
384pp, Little, Brown, £20

The British establishment has produced its fair share of turncoats. From Bloomsbury to Guy Burgess, an exotic array of pacifists, gays, dissidents and double agents have revolted against the stuffiness of their upper-class parents. They have formed a spiritual (and sometimes literal) fifth column in the world of Oxbridge and Whitehall. Yet their relationship to the establishment has betrayed more than a touch of what Freud might have called Oedipal ambivalence. EM Forster, Virginia Woolf, WH Auden, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby were in revolt against an England with which they also had deep bonds. The same might even be said of George Orwell. Most of them were able to turn the qualities they had acquired from their privileged upbringing - grit, self-assurance, sangfroid, a sense of duty - against the system that bred them.

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Review: Winnie and Wolf by AN Wilson

Terry Eagleton finds that politics is glossed over in AN Wilson's fictional take on Hitler and the Wagners, Winnie and Wolf

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Saturday August 11 2007

Unity Mitford attempted suicide when Britain declared war on Germany in 1939 and not in despair at Hitler's downfall. Her attempt failed and she died in 1948.

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