Philosophy

It may be difficult to believe when you think of Donald Trump, but the age of super-humans is almost upon us. Some people are confident that over the next century genetic engineering, electronic implants, new drugs and the medical defeat of ageing will give rise to a race of beings with capabilities far beyond our own. And what will they do with them? What will clichéd fears about ‘playing God’ mean to our descendants who, by comparison with us, will effectively be gods? Such questions exercise the historian authors of these two books. Michael Bess’s detailed and humane book adeptly surveys some eye-opening developments in current technology (bionic vision, thought-controlled

The Schooldays of Jesus is not, as it happens, about the schooldays of Jesus. It is the Man Booker-nominated sequel to The Childhood of Jesus (which, you guessed it, did not once refer to the childhood of Jesus either). J.M. Coetzee is now so much part of the literary pantheon, so liable to be rewarded by the critical classes and the academic industry surrounding him, that he no longer needs to worry about basics such as having a title that makes sense. He should still worry, one feels, about telling a story worth following. Like its predecessor, his new novel is set in a nameless Spanish-speaking province; a Kafkaesque, ‘featureless’ and

‘Is Geoff Dyer someone on your radar?’ inquired the courtly literary editor, inviting me to review this book. What a question! Envy is the writer’s sin, as everyone knows, and to a nonagenarian writer of my kind the very conception of Geoff Dyer, aged 57 and perhaps the most brilliantly original practitioner of his generation, figures green and large on any screen. Has he not won countless awards around the world? Has his work not been published, his publicists say, in more than 20 languages? More than 20? More than 20! And White Sands, an elegant parade of his talents, tells me why. It is not quite like any other

There were few subjects which escaped Oscar Wilde’s barbed wit: dentists, cynics, Americans, literary critics, democracy, the working classes, the middle classes, the upper classes and Bernard Shaw were all prey for his cutting paradoxes. Family, however, got off lightly. Not for Wilde the sinister or cruel depictions of relations which permeate the novels of Evelyn Waugh and find their dysfunctional climax in Brideshead. On the contrary, family is an affectionate theme running through most of Wilde’s work and is at the very heart of his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest — a play whose plot rests on the fact that the leading protagonist has lost his parents. This

Had you been down at Naumburg barracks early in March 1867, you might have seen a figure take a running jump at a horse and thud down front first on the pommel with a yelp. This was Friedrich Nietzsche, midway through his 23rd year and, thanks to a sickly childhood, no stranger to hospitals. Nietzsche lost part of his sternum, leaving him not so much pigeon-chested as angle-grinded. Once recovered, he celebrated by having his picture taken in full uniform, sabre at the ready, glaring at the ‘miserable photographer’ like a warrior set for battle. Daniel Blue regards the photo as ‘unflattering’ — though it’s nowhere near as unflattering as the picture

Iris Murdoch’s emotionally hectic novels have been enjoying a comeback lately, with an excellent Radio 4 dramatisation of The Sea, the Sea, and an equally gripping rendition, on Woman’s Hour, of A Severed Head. Her books are distinguished by the rate at which her characters fall in and out of love with one another, usually leaving streams of chaos and pain behind them. Iris’s letters, especially the ones which were written before she began to write novels, were blueprints for the fiction. In one confessional epistle, to David Hicks — not the interior designer, but an Oxford chum of the same name who had become a British Council lecturer —