JON BALDWIN recommends a provocative assertion of how working-class culture can rethink knowledge
When you can’t see the wood for the trees
JOHN GREEN is dissatisfied with a book that fails to address the promotion of ignorance as a ruling-class strategy to maintain control
KNOWLEDGE FOR ALL: Wycliffe's Bible in the British Library - Jorge Luis Borges mentions Wycliffite Bibles in his short story The Book of Sand, where he calls it the ‘Black-letter Wyclif,’ in reference to the Blackletter script used to write the publication
These are vivid accounts of people’s experiences of far-right violence along with documentation of popular resistance, says MARJORIE MAYO
The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE, JOHN GREEN and ANGUS REID review An Army of Women, Julie Keeps Quiet, The Friend and The Ugly Stepsister
GORDON PARSONS squirms at a production that attempts to update Shakespeare’s comedy to a tale of Premier League football
Above a Gothic bar just down from Brighton station, something spooky is happening, suggests JAMES WALSH
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MIK SABIERS enjoys the theatrical feminist six piece who have a lot of fun that the audience feeds off as the set rolls on
Ignorance and Bliss – On Wanting Not To Know
Mark Lilla, Hurst, £18.99
MARK LILLA, Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, purports to investigate the contrary disposition to curiosity: the will not to know, the will to ignorance.
Certainly an interesting subject, but he treats it quintessentially as a disquisition from the ivory tower of academe. He takes us on a seemingly aimless ramble though the thickets of mythology, Biblical narratives and religious belief.
He begins by using the example of Oedipus, the most notorious case of someone whose ignorance determines their tragic fate, then races on through the mythological basis of fascism, to the role played by Christian fundamentalism in the historical self-narrative of the US, but in a very superficial way.
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JOHN GREEN recommends an entertaining, if harsh and instructive, study of bullying, discipline and power dynamics in schools and at work
