Philosophy

How often, when listening to announcers or weather forecasters or politicians on the radio, do I think, ‘That’s an ugly voice’! This seldom applies to speakers with educated regional accents, such as Scottish, Irish or Yorkshire, but all too often to those from London or the Midlands where good standard English is becoming a rarity. This is not a matter of class; ‘Sloane’ voices are as unappealing as ‘Estuary’ ones; indeed the two sometimes hideously cross-fertilise. Good speech is a matter of clarity and the unselfconscious enjoyment of the spoken language. It was an unexpected and nostalgic pleasure to listen to old recordings of or about the Bloomsbury Group. These

I have never met Roger Scruton, though I would like to; wine fans are slightly obsessional and enjoy clustering together, like trainspotters, though tasting rooms are more welcoming than the end of a platform at Crewe. We’re also very different. Shortly after I, working for the left-of-centre Guardian, became the wine writer for this conservative magazine, Scruton, a right-wing philosopher, took the same job at the New Statesman. Given the rivalry between these two organs, I took a keen interest in what he wrote. For instance, round about the same time that he pointed out that ‘it is almost impossible to find a decent Burgundy these days for less than

The answer is Heathrow Airport’s newest terminal, as seen through the eyes of Alain de Botton, who agreed over the summer to become its first writer in residence. It was a brave task to take on; not only could the result have been very dull but de Botton could have felt bound to be nice. Instead he has produced a work which will do no harm to his reputation for thought-provoking reportage. This slim book is simultaneously poignant and terribly funny, thanks to de Botton’s knack of seeing the philosophical in the mundane and not being afraid to play up the incongruity. It is snobbish, too, but its targets are

A graphic novel about logic? The idea is not as far-fetched, or as innovative, as one might think. Back in the 1970s, the publishing company Writers and Readers began producing a series of comic books (as they were then called) which sought to provide entertaining and instructive introductions, both to individual philosophers (Marx for Beginners, Wittgenstein for Beginners) and to intellectual movements and disciplines (Postmodernism for Beginners, Economics for Beginners). The series was extremely successful and many of these books are still in print. Like those earlier books, Logicomix is written with the earnest intention to make an important but difficult body of work accessible to ordinary readers and a