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'The idea which I shall present here came to me more or less out of
the blue. I was on a train some five years ago, on my way to spend
a day at Headingley, and I was reading a book about the death camp
Sobibor... The particular, not very appropriate, conjunction
involved for me in this train journey...had the effect of fixing my
thoughts on one of the more dreadful features of human coexistence,
when in the shape of a simple five-word phrase the idea occurred to
me.' The contract of mutual indifference In this classic work,
newly reissued here with a preface by Oliver Kamm, Norman Geras
discusses a central aspect of the experience of the Holocaust with
a view to exploring its most important contemporary implications. A
bold and powerful synthesis of memorial, literary record,
historical reflection and political theory, Geras's argument
focuses on the figure of the bystander - the bystander to the
destruction of the Jews of Europe and the bystander to more recent
atrocity - to consider the moral consequences of looking on without
active responses at persecution and great suffering. This book
argues that we owe a duty of help to those who are suffering under
terrible oppression. Geras contends that the tragedy of European
Jewry - so widely pondered by historians, social scientists,
psychologists, theologians and others - has not yet found its
proper reflection within political philosophy. Attempting to fill
the gap, he adapts an old idea from within that tradition of
enquiry, the idea of the social contract, to the task of thinking
about the triangular relation between perpetrators, victims and
bystanders, and draws a sombre conclusion from it. Geras goes on to
ask how far this conclusion may be offset by the hypothesis of a
universal duty to bring aid. The contract of mutual indifference is
an original and challenging work, aimed at the complacent
abstraction of much contemporary theory-building. It is
supplemented by three shorter essays on the implications of the
Jewish catastrophe for conceptions of human nature and progress. --
.
'A spirited attack on Thomas Jefferson . . . a quietly devastating
foray into the scripture of the American Revolution.' Frank
Callanan, Irish Times Thomas Jefferson, American Minister to France
1785-9, was an enthusiast for the French Revolution and believed
its virtues could be exported back to an America that had waned
morally since its own great revolutionary 'moment'. In this
conviction Jefferson was both championing a cause and playing good
populist politics. But Conor Cruise O'Brien proposes - in this
magisterial 1998 work - that Jefferson's own passions waned in the
America of the 1790s once French egalitarian ideals ran up against
the slave-based Southern economy he supported. 'His thesis will
seem like heresy to many people in America . . . but O'Brien makes
out a good case.' Sunday Telegraph 'The Long Affair should be read
by anyone interested in Jefferson - or in a good fight.' New York
Times Book Review
Conor Cruise O'Brien's majestic meditation on the life and writings
of Burke was originally published in 1992. 'O'Brien [had] been
brooding on Edmund Burke for decades. First he worked on a
narrative approach and came to a standstill, he knew not why. Then,
in the light of much painful observation of the world and its
wickedness, he turned to a thematic treatment, inspired by Yeats's
elliptic lines: "American colonies, Ireland, France and India /
Harried, and Burke's great melody against it." "It", he decided,
was the abuse of power.' Paul Johnson, Independent on Sunday 'The
best book about Edmund Burke ever written . . . It succeeds in
liberating this remarkable, tormented and brilliant man from those
confusing and confining details of British high political life . .
. O'Brien's version of Burke's career is a self-reflective and
immensely personal one, but its authenticity penetrates to the
core.' Linda Colley, Observer
In Herod: Reflections on Political Violence (first published in
1978) Conor Cruise O'Brien collects a number of essays alongside
three short plays that dramatise political arguments through the
infamous figure of the Roman king of Judaea for whom the collection
is named. 'A great book. In it, O'Brien not only denounces IRA
terrorism, as you would expect from a mainstream politician, but -
in a sense quite different from the rationalisations offered by
ideological apologists for political violence - seeks to understand
it. I mean, really understand it - not extenuate it by equivocation
and non sequitur. And his thinking leads him to attack the
republican mythology at the heart of the Irish state. Few writers
have analysed terrorism so acutely or been as effective in
undermining its ideological justifications.' Oliver Kamm, from his
preface to this edition
The Suspecting Glance (first published in 1972) collects Conor
Cruise O'Brien's four T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures as delivered at
the University of Kent, Canterbury, in November 1969. The lectures
were inspired by O'Brien's experience of holding the Albert
Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at New York University from 1965-9,
and there teaching students in whom he noted burning radical
convictions but also a disconcerting 'lack of suspicion in those
bright, young eyes'. Whereas to O'Brien's mind the 'suspecting
glance' was a mark of political maturity that had to be first
directed at one's own opinions prior to decrying another's. Brien's
Eliot lectures were, as his friend Frank Callanan noted, a
'corrective gesture' toward his New York experience. In them he
considers four writers - Machiavelli, Burke, Nietzsche, Yeats -
whom he reads as being 'profoundly aware of the resource and
versatility of violence and deception in man, in society, and in
themselves'.
Arguably Conor Cruise O'Brien's most influential and admired book
was this brilliant collection of essays - on history, literature
and public affairs - first published in 1965. 'I can still remember
the excitement with which I discovered a copy of Writers and
Politics, in a provincial library in Devonshire thirty years ago.
Nobody who tries to write about either of those subjects, or about
"the bloody crossroads" where they have so often met, can disown a
debt to the Cruiser.' Christopher Hitchens, London Review of Books
'When a liberal can write such pieces as "Mercy and Mercenaries",
"Journal de Combat", "Varieties of Anti-Communism", "A New Yorker
Critic", and "Generation of Saints", an important voice has
returned to our culture.' Raymond Williams, Guardian
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Camus (Paperback, Main)
Conor Cruise O'Brien; Introduction by Oliver Kamm
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R415
Discovery Miles 4 150
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Essential reading for old fans and new admirers of Albert Camus'
classic quarantine novel THE PLAGUE - a new bestseller amidst the
coronavirus pandemic. 'Brilliant.' The Times 'Joyous ... A unique
critical talent.' TLS Albert Camus is one of the most famous French
writers of the twentieth century, a Nobel Laureate celebrated for
his classic existentialist novel The Outsider and urgently relevant
allegory of a pandemic, The Plague. But what about his
controversial attitudes to race, especially his portrayal of Arabs
versus Europeans, and French colonialism in Algeria? As provocative
and brilliantly argued as it was in 1970, Conor Cruise O'Brien's
Camus is a groundbreaking postcolonial critique which
revolutionised how Camus was viewed by a new generation.
Conor Cruise O'Brien's brilliant and hugely controversial 1965
essay on the political convictions of W. B. Yeats is the
title-piece for this superb 1988 collection of pieces on politics,
religion, nationalism and terrorism. 'O'Brien is a man of strong
views, and he writes with verve and wit. Agree with him or not, one
reads him with enjoyment.' Foreign Affairs '[Passion and Cunning]
displays once again [O'Brien's] wonderful range of talents: a
beautiful command of the language, gentle wit and coruscating
satire, shrewd political judgment and a raking critical power.
O'Brien is, moreover, a critic against all-comers, his spiky guns
pointing in all directions: woe betide anyone incautious enough to
presume that O'Brien is on their 'side'. . . O'Brien believes in
all manner of good causes, but his own independence is finally what
he cares about most.' R. W. Johnson, London Review of Books
The first literary phase in the brilliant and protean career of
Conor Cruise O'Brien was his work as critic for Dublin literary
magazine The Bell, which begat this collection of essays first
published in 1952 (under the pseudonym 'Donat O'Donnell', as
O'Brien was then a working civil servant). In it, O'Brien set
himself to a study of 'the patterns of several exceptionally vivid
imaginations which are permeated by Catholicism' - from Graham
Greene and Evelyn Waugh to Francois Mauriac and Paul Claudel - and
to analyse 'what those patterns might share'. The originality and
flair of Maria Cross won O'Brien many vocal admirers, among them
Dag Hammarskjoeld, cerebral Secretary-General of the United
Nations. 'A most interesting and at times brilliant book, admirably
and wittily written.' New Statesman 'One of the most acute and
stimulating books of literary criticism to be published for some
years.' Spectator
Conor Cruise O'Brien's second book, published in 1957, grew out of
the doctoral thesis he had submitted at Dublin's Trinity College
that, in 1954, duly earned him his PhD. In Parnell and His Party,
1880-1890, O'Brien applied a finessing scholarly eye to the figure
of Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party
and formidable proponent of Home Rule whose career was abruptly
ruined by the 'Mrs O'Shea' divorce scandal of 1890 that split his
party and dominated Irish politics for a generation. For O'Brien
this schism was of more than academic interest: his maternal
grandfather David Sheehy was among the MPs who repudiated Parnell.
'An indispensable classic half a century after its first
publication . . . a profound analysis of power and charisma in
democratic politics.' Roy Foster, Standpoint 'One of the essential
books of modern Irish history, a shrewd and clarifying study.'
Thomas Flanagan
'Highly recommended . . . The title of the book reflects its focus:
the international, political, religious, social, and diplomatic
forces affecting the history of the Jews who identified with
Zionism and later with the state of Israel.' Library Journal 'As
Ireland's representative to United Nations discussions of
Palestinian refugees, Conor Cruise O'Brien sat between Israel and
Iraq . . . O'Brien now suggests that a solution to Middle East
anguish may not even be possible. That so bleak a view is the basis
for so enlightening a book can be attributed to the author's
capabilities as a historian, journalist and political analyst, not
to mention storyteller.' Time 'One is hard pressed to recall
another [book] which deals in depth with this vast and prickly
subject that is as bold or as readable.' Publishers Weekly 'It
bears the mark of a restless, original, idiosyncratic mind.' Abba
Eban, Los Angeles Times 'A fine work of scholarship whose analysis
stands up well in the light of later events.' Oliver Kamm, from his
preface to this edition
Written in 1972 in the wake of Bloody Sunday and direct rule,
States of Ireland was Conor Cruise O'Brien's searching analysis of
contemporary Irish nationalism: part-memoir, part-history,
part-polemic. 'If The Great Melody (1992) is O'Brien's major
academic work, States of Ireland is the one that will endure as a
vital moment in Irish intellectual and political history.' Roy
Foster, Standpoint 'States of Ireland [is] a book which influenced
a generation. [O'Brien] saw that partition, while scarcely
desirable in itself, recognized the reality of two different
communities in the island, and that the Dublin state's formal
irredentist claim on Northern Ireland was undemocratic and even
imperialistic, as well as insincere. The republican ideology to
which most Irish people paid lip service was a shirt of Nessus, he
later wrote: "it clings to us and burns".' Geoffrey Wheatcroft,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
July 1960: The newly independent Congo is hit by the secession of
its mineral rich-province Katanga, led by Moise Tshombe and backed
by Belgium and Britain. June 1961: Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien arrives
in Katanga as Special Representative of United Nations Secretary
General Dag Hammarskjoeld, his task (under a UN resolution) to
arrest and repatriate the mercenaries and foreign interests
propping up Tshombe. The consequences of this mission will prove
fateful for all parties. This is the story of how a brilliant Irish
diplomat found himself in Africa amid one of history's maelstroms.
O'Brien reconstructs the complex, tragic, sometimes comic events of
a drama in which he found himself controversially at centre stage.
The result is history from the inside: a valuable study of 'the
game of nations', and of the UN's unique functioning and
malfunctioning.
'The idea which I shall present here came to me more or less out of
the blue. I was on a train some five years ago, on my way to spend
a day at Headingley, and I was reading a book about the death camp
Sobibor... The particular, not very appropriate, conjunction
involved for me in this train journey...had the effect of fixing my
thoughts on one of the more dreadful features of human coexistence,
when in the shape of a simple five-word phrase the idea occurred to
me.' The contract of mutual indifference In this classic work,
newly reissued here with a preface by Oliver Kamm, Norman Geras
discusses a central aspect of the experience of the Holocaust with
a view to exploring its most important contemporary implications. A
bold and powerful synthesis of memorial, literary record,
historical reflection and political theory, Geras's argument
focuses on the figure of the bystander - the bystander to the
destruction of the Jews of Europe and the bystander to more recent
atrocity - to consider the moral consequences of looking on without
active responses at persecution and great suffering. This book
argues that we owe a duty of help to those who are suffering under
terrible oppression. Geras contends that the tragedy of European
Jewry - so widely pondered by historians, social scientists,
psychologists, theologians and others - has not yet found its
proper reflection within political philosophy. Attempting to fill
the gap, he adapts an old idea from within that tradition of
enquiry, the idea of the social contract, to the task of thinking
about the triangular relation between perpetrators, victims and
bystanders, and draws a sombre conclusion from it. Geras goes on to
ask how far this conclusion may be offset by the hypothesis of a
universal duty to bring aid. The contract of mutual indifference is
an original and challenging work, aimed at the complacent
abstraction of much contemporary theory-building. It is
supplemented by three shorter essays on the implications of the
Jewish catastrophe for conceptions of human nature and progress. --
.
'A tour de force . . . an important, affecting and effective book'
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL '[A] gorgeous and urgent book' STEVEN PINKER
'MENDING THE MIND reminds us that, despite our hazy understanding
of depression, and despite the true horror of the illness, some
hope for recovery remains' THE TIMES Sadness is an inevitable part
of life, but for most people it will usually alternate or coexist
with happy times. Clinical depression, on the other hand, is a
mental disorder that causes torment and anguish. It has no moments
of relief. It unhinges us from everything we thought we knew about
the world and makes us strangers to those we love. It is the
predominant mental-health problem worldwide, affecting more than
250 million people. More than a fifth of the population of the UK
report symptoms of depression or anxiety. Yet how much do we really
know of the condition and of ways to treat it? In MENDING THE MIND,
Oliver Kamm recounts what it's like to be mentally ill with severe
depression, and he details the route by which, with professional
help, he was able to make a full recovery. His experience prompted
him to find out all he could about a condition that has afflicted
humanity throughout recorded history. He explains the progress of
science in understanding depression, and the insights into the
condition that have been provided by writers and artists through
the ages. His message is hopeful: though depression is a real and
devastating illness, the mind and its disorders are yielding to
scientific inquiry, and effective psychological, psychiatric and
pharmacological treatments are already available. Candid,
revelatory and deeply versed in current scientific research,
MENDING THE MIND sets out in plain language how the scourge of
clinical depression can be countered and may eventually be
overcome.
'A tour de force . . . an important, affecting and effective book'
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL '[A] gorgeous and urgent book' STEVEN PINKER
'Reminds us that, despite our hazy understanding of depression, and
despite the true horror of the illness, some hope for recovery
remains' THE TIMES 'Extremely intelligent, compassionate and
well-written' EVENING STANDARD Sadness is an inevitable part of
life, but for most of us it coexists with happiness. Clinical
depression, however, unhinges us from everything we know about the
world and makes us strangers to those we love. It is the
predominant mental-health problem worldwide, affecting more than
250 million people. Yet how much do we really know about the
condition and how to treat it? Drawing on his own experience of a
disorder that has afflicted humanity throughout history, Oliver
Kamm charts the progress of science in understanding depression and
explores insights from writers and artists through the ages.
Hopeful, revelatory and deeply versed in current research, Mending
the Mind sets out in plain language how clinical depression can be
countered - and may eventually be overcome.
Sadness is an inevitable part of life, but for most people it will usually alternate or coexist with happy times. Clinical depression, on the other hand, is a mental disorder that causes torment and anguish. It has no moments of relief. It unhinges us from everything we thought we knew about the world and makes us strangers to those we love. It is the predominant mental-health problem worldwide, affecting more than 250 million people. More than a fifth of the population of the UK report symptoms of depression or anxiety. Yet how much do we really know of the condition and of ways to treat it?
In MENDING THE MIND, Oliver Kamm recounts what it's like to be mentally ill with severe depression, and he details the route by which, with professional help, he was able to make a full recovery. His experience prompted him to find out all he could about a condition that has afflicted humanity throughout recorded history. He explains the progress of science in understanding depression, and the insights into the condition that have been provided by writers and artists through the ages. His message is hopeful: though depression is a real and devastating illness, the mind and its disorders are yielding to scientific inquiry, and effective psychological, psychiatric and pharmacological treatments are already available. Candid, revelatory and deeply versed in current scientific research, MENDING THE MIND sets out in plain language how the scourge of clinical depression can be countered and may eventually be overcome.
Are standards of English alright - or should that be all right? To
knowingly split an infinitive or not to? And what about ending a
sentence with preposition, or for that matter beginning one with
'and'? We learn language by instinct, but good English, the pedants
tell us, requires rules. Yet, as Oliver Kamm demonstrates, many of
the purists' prohibitions are bogus and can be cheerfully
disregarded. ACCIDENCE WILL HAPPEN is an authoritative and deeply
reassuring guide to grammar, style and the linguistic conundrums we
all face. 'A unique and indispensable guide to usage' STEVEN PINKER
'An immensely intelligent and playful polemic, cheeky and erudite
by turns...certainly gets the blood pumping, so do read it' THE
TIMES 'A superb book' INDEPENDENT
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