In the Critics section of this week’s New Statesman, our lead book reviewer John Gray reviews Why Tolerate Religion? by the American political philosopher Brian Leiter. “Why treat religiously based claims of conscience as morally privileged, while denying similar exemption to others?” Gray asks. “How such conflicts can be settled is far from clear but Leiter believes there is no reason for giving religions any special standing.” There is nothing special about religion, Gray goes on: “Clinging to beliefs against evidence is a universal human tendency … Toleration means accepting that most of our beliefs are always going to be unwarranted.”
Also in Books: Leo Robson reviews Julian Barnes’s essay collection Through the Window, and is put off by Barnes’s “rivalrous, gossip-minded and passive-aggressive” writerly persona – “Even the most enthusiastic essays here are full of rib-nudges and eye pokes”; Antonia Quirke reviews Richard Burton’s diaries, the “most captivating book of the year”; Vernon Bogdanor reviews Making Thatcher’s Britain, a collection of essays on the legacy of Thatcherism, and The Conservatives Since 1945 by Tim Bale; and David Shariatmadari reviews Sara Maitland’s exploration of the fairy tale, Gossip From the Forest.
This week’s Critic at large is writer and psychotherapist Talitha Stevenson, who asks why so many of the pathologies of modern life are assuming a form previously thought to be peculiar to creative writers. “As a psychotherapist I see people with solicitor’s block and banker’s block and designer’s block and surgeon’s block – and the pain is the same pain in each case.”
Elsewhere in the Critics: NS pop critic Kate Mossman reviews Kylie Minogue’s The Abbey Road Sessions (“Minogue has become a mannequin upon which her fans project grand abstracts like joy, strength, liberation and love”); Matt Trueman reviews Trojan Women at the Gate Theatre and Arab Nights at the Soho Theatre; Antonia Quirke enjoys an episode of Radio 3’s The Essay; Rachel Cooke defends the BBC’s arts presenter Waldemar Januszczak; and Ryan Gilbey welcomes Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt as “a Midwich Cuckoos for the Savile era”.
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