Auguste Comte

A hundred years ago, T.S. Eliot wrote to Geoffrey Faber, for whose publishing company he had just started work, complaining: ‘The Defence of the West… is a subject about which everyone thinks he has something to say.’ Plus ça change? Back then, people were coming to terms with a war that had shown the West to be neither as unified nor as civilised as had been assumed. A century on, American isolationism, demographic decline, mass immigration, Islamism and a slow but decisive shift in global economic gravity are giving commentators the opportunity to bloviate endlessly about the decline/suicide/end/decay/of the West. But what exactly it is that we are defending or

Best remembered now in the English-speaking world as a lyricist, Friedrich Schiller is often quoted for his line: ‘Against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.’ I was waiting for that observation in A Short History of Stupidity. It didn’t appear, but Stuart Jeffries assembles an impressive team of thinkers who have come to the same conclusion. You can’t win: imbecility will always ace you. The great crime for Socrates was ignorance – something often mistaken for stupidity There is of course the question of what exactly constitutes stupidity. It’s a hard thing to pin down and the definition strays into many areas. Jeffries offers a learned, picturesque ramble through

‘Everything obscene comes from France,’ wrote James Dixon, an eye surgeon retired to Dorking, in 1888. He was provoked by learning of an item called a condom, and explained to his correspondent, James Murray, that this was ‘a contrivance used by fornicators, to save themselves from a well-deserved clap’. Surely the word had no place in the Oxford English Dictionary, of which Murray had for the previous nine years been editor? Murray was persuaded and left it out. Dixon was a useful source of information about words relating to medicine, and Oxford’s team of under-resourced lexicographers relied on the goodwill of such volunteers. Ogilvie’s book is an engaging sideways look