Engelsberg Ideas

Engelsberg Ideas offers outstanding writings from some of the most prominent minds in history, culture, and philosophy. The platform showcases essays, historical profiles, and frequent podcasts. Best of all, Engelsberg Ideas is completely free to read, giving everyone the opportunity to access high-quality content.

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Under the spell of William Blake

1 week ago | engelsbergideas.com | Michael Prodger

William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, Philip Hoare, Fourth Estate, 464pp, £22Towards the end of his life, William Blake wrote that: ‘Mere natural objects always did, and now do, weaken, deaden and obliterate imagination in me.’ Natural objects, he believed, were just pallid likenesses of spiritual objects, and it was those sublime originals that fired him.
Brian Wilson was made for these times

2 weeks ago | engelsbergideas.com | Bryan Appleyard

We happy few who attained consciouness, however minimal, in the sixties can count ourselves lucky, especially those of us who were alive and alert in May and June 1966. In June, Bob Dylan’s double album Blonde on Blonde was released and, in May, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds appeared in the LP racks. Either can still legitimately claim the title of greatest record ever made. Dylan is 84 and still touring; Brian Wilson, the presiding genius of the Beach Boys died this week, aged 82.
The merits of a wartime mentality

3 weeks ago | engelsbergideas.com | Lawrence Freedman

The commentary surrounding the release of the UK’s latest Strategic Defence Review (SDR) concentrated on its least interesting feature. The review is written on the assumption that during the next Parliament the share of GDP devoted to defence will rise to three per cent. The British government has endorsed this target without quite promising that it will be reached, because they can’t be sure of the state of the economy in five years time, or for that matter the international situation.
Alasdair MacIntyre's philosophy for a new dark age

4 weeks ago | engelsbergideas.com | Christopher Akers

In Walter M. Miller Jr’s 1959 post-apocalyptic novel A Canticle for Lebowitz, surviving human knowledge is hit by a calamity after a nuclear war destroys civilisation. Any signs of learning, from the literate and scientists to books and instruments, are annihilated by mobs. Centuries on, surviving artefacts and relics from the past world have been stripped from their original context and natural science sits in a state of deep disorder.
Why liberal democracies win total wars

1 month ago | engelsbergideas.com | Duncan Weldon

Winston Churchill had more experience of conflict than most British politicians.
The high price of Trump's energy

1 month ago | engelsbergideas.com | Jenny McCartney

Nearly 30 years ago, in 1998, I watched the US President Bill Clinton working the crowd on a visit to Northern Ireland in the aftermath of the Belfast Agreement. He was in serious trouble at home over the Monica Lewinsky affair, and certainly in bad odour with his wife Hillary, who maintained a notably cool distance from him during their walkabouts.
A new world of discovery

1 month ago | engelsbergideas.com | Caroline Eden

Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of Discovery, Simon Park, Viking, £25Winslow Homer (1836-1910), the great American Realist painter, is best remembered for his depictions of seascapes and maritime calamities, especially The Life Line (1884) portraying heaving waves and the rescue of two figures from a stricken ship. It is the fierce spectacle of nature doing its worst that appealed to the poets, just as it is the same for us who stand spellbound before dramatic artworks.
Was Richard Sorge the perfect spy?

1 month ago | engelsbergideas.com | Owen Matthews

Who is it that traitors really betray? Their countries, in the case of spies and turncoats. Their friends, colleagues and even family members whom they deceive, of course. But has any traitor ever believed that they were betraying themselves? ‘To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good,’ was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s formulation in The Gulag Archipelago.
The art of Siena: a question of perspective

1 month ago | engelsbergideas.com | Alastair Benn

Just a few miles from Siena, the Tuscan countryside’s contours of farm and vineyard are broken by a perfectly shaped conical mound, crowned with a grove of cypress trees. A stone pyramid on its summit, visible from every approach, bears simple white plaques on two of its sides. One reads ‘MCCLX’, for 1260, and on the other, ‘Montaperti’, or ‘the hill of death’.
What Mary Shelley did in the shadows

1 month ago | engelsbergideas.com | Malcolm Forbes

Mary Shelley in Bath, introduced by Fiona Sampson, Manderley Press, £19.99The birth of Frankenstein has become the stuff of literary legend. In 1816, the so-called ‘Year Without a Summer’, 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin – not yet Mary Shelley – travelled to Switzerland with her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley, their baby son William and her stepsister Claire Clairmont.