Jonathan Safran Foer’s contingent vegetarianism
Among philosophers of a certain persuasion, there is a basic argument for animal rights. Ethics isn’t mathematics; but by the standards of accuracy and precision involved in moral reasoning, this argument is about as unassailable an argument as you can get in moral philosophy. There is a problem with unassailable moral arguments however, and that is that it’s hard to make people care about them. In his book Philosophical Explanations, Robert Nozick entertained a little fantasy about a hypothetical and unspecified argument that is so powerful, so utterly compelling, that refusal to accept it sets up reverberations in the brain and kills the refuser. But bitter experience teaches us that there are no such, as we might call them, Arguments of Mass Destruction. Humans are not rational creatures in this sense; we don’t respond well to logical argument.

W. B. Yeats and King Oedipus
In the minds of Irish-nationalist men of letters, around the end of the nineteenth century and the earlier years of the twentieth, there existed a special affinity between Ireland and Ancient Greece. There might even be a shared mission. According to Patrick Pearse, who headed the Easter Rising in 1916, “what the Greek was to the ancient world the Gael will be to the modern”. Above all, though, the sense of affinity rested on the perceived kinship between traditions of heroic poetry and myth. For the historian Standish O’Grady, the Irish heroic age surpassed even the Homeric.

The Sun King (and his wife)
Louis XIV was born in 1638, came to the throne in 1643 and died in 1715, after one of the longest reigns in the history of the French monarchy. The years 2009 and 2010 cannot be seen as marking anniversaries. Yet there has rarely been such an outpouring of books and exhibitions on the Sun King. The historian Christophe Levantal produced a “chronographie”, two volumes amounting to 1,060 pages and over 8,000 notes detailing the 28,121 days of the King’s existence based on the 80,000 pages of Théophraste Renaudot’s La Gazette. A new biography by the popular writer Jean-Christian Petitfils has recently appeared. Two massive volumes totalling 1,306 pages have come from Olivier Chaline, an expanded version of an 808-page tome published in 2005. Two books on the artistic tastes of Louis XIV and on the role music played in his life have been provided by the musicologist and Academician Philippe Beaussant. To these can be added several re-editions of earlier works.

Mysteries at the heart of Stalin's empire
"Never in my life have I taken first place”, muses the narrator of Kamennyi most (The Stone Bridge), as he lines up his toy soldiers on a flea market stall in Moscow on a quiet autumn Sunday in 1998. Such is the opening of Alexander Terekhov’s 832-page novel, last year’s most talked-about work of fiction in Russia which took second prize in the Big Book awards. A graduate of the Journalism Faculty of the Moscow University (like many of the leading literary figures of his generation), Terekhov, who was born in 1966, began his career as an essayist and journalist. He published his first novel, Krysoboi, in 1995 (it came out in English as The Rat Killer in 2008). Kamennyi most is his second, and so far it exists only in Russian.