Author: Ophelia Benson

Scientists are humorless nerds, and crop circles and crystals are more fun.

‘There is nothing sacrosanct about any culture or religion’s rituals. Cultures are neither monolithic, unchanging, nor without internal critique and resistance…’

When students are consumers, they want what they pay for.

Terrorists, freedom fighters, fundamentalists, postcolonialism, the Enlightenment – all contested, as usual.

‘A Russian, an Italian, could not justify beating his wife to death by referring to the customs of dear old Moscow or Calabria’

Paul Krugman draws an interesting parallel with Stephen Jay Gould.

Betrousered, two-eyed philosopher Ventre considers a world in which Things are Against Us.

Dissent is part of all cultures, Asian decidedly included.

Most government-funded Islamic clubs ‘are run by deeply conservative men and perpetuate the segregation of women.’

Richard Dawkins on the cowardly flabbiness of the intellect that afflicts otherwise rational people confronted with long-established religions.

If you number your paragraphs, will people mistake you for Adorno?

‘Indian history from the perspective of the Hindutva ideology reintroduces ideas that have long been discarded and are of little relevance to an understanding of the past.’

‘Developments take place in a world linked by ideas rather than by race.’

Investors need to know the truth, but voters don’t. Or not.

Washington freed his slaves in his will, Jefferson did not. The reasons of each tell us much about American history.

‘In the clamorous and bloodstained souk of the world…people still go unrepentantly on looking out for good lives’

‘When I grew up and became a literary critic, I learned to keep silent about the reading experiences of liberation that I’d enjoyed since childhood.’

Prose as a window-pane opens onto a reality that is solidly and visibly ‘out there.’

‘There has been a tendency among Marxist, or marxisant, critics of Darwin, and social Darwinism, to criticise, or ridicule, the theory as a simple product of the society in which it was developed.’

‘Sexual selection really is a good candidate for explaining a great deal about the unique evolution of our species.’