“Tomorrow they won’t dare to murder us”, by Joseph Andras, confronts one of modern France’s two unpardonable crimes.   Sean Sheehan   The first  was the collaborationist Vichy government that didn’t just come to terms with Nazi power – regretfully, under duress, so the story went – but willingly rounded […]

George Berkeley is best known today as the eighteenth-century thinker who wrote “A treatise concerning the principles of human knowledge”.   Sean Sheehan   He argued that material reality only exists as mental states in the mind. What we think of as reality – the stuff of the world, like […]

As all Jane Austen groupies will tell you, the people that inhabit her small but perfectly formed body of work are as real and immediate to us they were to Austen’s contemporaries.   Sean Sheehan   We all know a Mr Collins and it is a truth universally acknowledged that […]

Seeking to ‘glimpse the gentle law that guides the human race’ is a lofty if probably unattainable aspiration but the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), in the preface to the stories that make up his “Motley stones”, imputes such a desire to all of us.   Sean Sheehan   The […]

As a figure in world history Martin Luther has a place alongside Alexander the Great or Napoleon, individuals whose actions shaped the world for centuries after their death.   Sean Sheehan   Just as there are still cities named after Alexander, just as secularism in France today owes its existence […]