We spend much of our lives working. And much of the time we are not working, we spend talking about work, recovering from work, fretting about work, or wondering if we should work more or work less.
But less often do we stop to think more deeply about work. What…
The other day, I took a break from my writing desk and went into the kitchen to make bread. There’s something therapeutic about the process of mixing flour and yeast and water, combining it, then turning it out onto the table to knead it into shape.
When I write, sometimes…
Several years ago, I attended a talk by the Canadian poet Erín Moure. She talked about poetry and translation and writing. It was a talk so full of brilliant insights that, as I jotted things down in my notebook, I struggled to keep up. But after the talk, as I…
I arrived in Yangon for the first time in January 2017, my life broken into pieces. The previous year had been punishing. In August, Elee, my partner of thirteen years, died of breast cancer. Before her death, we talked about what I would do after. I said I didn’t know…
The day after Christmas day last year marked the death of Desmond Mpilo Tutu (1931–2021), the Nobel Prizewinner, anti-apartheid activist and former archbishop of Cape Town.
Tutu’s life was extraordinary, as is his legacy. Born in 1931 to Tswana and Xhosa parents, he studied theology in London before returning to…
Andy West is Philosopher in Residence at HMP Pentonville, and the author of the frankly brilliant The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy, which is due out from Picador in February 2022.
Q: One of the reasons I’m interested in doing these interviews is I want to…
The Greek philosopher Epicurus is a philosopher most often associated with hedonism, the idea that the good life is a life where we should seek to maximise our pleasure. This might conjure up images of wild excess, or endless drug-fuelled orgies. And this, in fact, is how Epicurus’s opponents sometimes…
It’s the time of year when, for those of us who live in countries and communities where Christmas is celebrated, we face the prospect of an explosion of gift exchange. This gift-giving raises all kinds of practical issues (as I asked in my last piece, what do you get a…
So, in those countries where Christmas is celebrated, it’s getting to that time of year when the eternal philosophical problem presents itself: what should I get as a gift for Uncle Pedro?
Last year’s socks didn’t go down well: he didn’t wear them even once. Then there was the debacle…
The philosopher Chrysippus was born sometime around 279 BCE in the town of Soli, now on the southern coast of Turkey. He remains intriguing to this day for his radical theory of human emotion.
The (always unreliable, and always entertaining) commentator, Diogenes Laërtius, says that Chrysippus first trained as a…
