A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, ….

The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, pow….

Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace..

Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence - one reason why culture remains s….

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it fee….

If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal..

Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpati….

Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happe….

All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill..

Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used ….

An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitl….

Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it..

Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one..

I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means..

A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness, but one in which everyo….

Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin'….

[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly c….

People do evil things because they are evil. Some people are evil in the way that some things are coloured indigo. They commit their evil deeds not t….

Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to ….

Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced..

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was..