Wednesday Links

The life and work of Gillian Rose, Oxford at war, the real Woodrow Wilson, Hemingway's debt to Dante, and more.

A scientist makes penicillin in a lab at Oxford

Good morning. The philosopher Gillian Rose converted to Anglicanism on her death bed in 1995. Jenny Turner revisits her life and work:

Of the many allegories of the philosophical task, as she saw it, scattered through Gillian Rose’s writings, this one, from Judaism and Modernity (1993), is my favourite. ‘One must be able to give and take from others, to acknowledge difference and identity, togetherness and separation, understanding and misunderstanding’: so think of thinking itself as a friendship, always dialectical, social and political and historical, always changing, never at rest. Exhausting, yes, demanding, frustrating and disappointing, heartbreaking, humiliating, a total pain: but what else actually is there? What else can any of us do instead?

‘The end of history’ was enormous when Rose was writing in the early 1990s, with Western liberal democracy triumphant and all the big geopolitical matters supposedly settled. As was ‘the end of philosophy’, as poststructuralism exposed the imperialism of Western rational thinking, its dominance and its dualism, and its sexism and racism too. A terrible friend, clearly, so clearly we had to dump it; except that once we have dumped it, what do we have left? ‘Difficulty with reason,’ Rose wrote, ‘leads to its being reneged altogether – with disastrous consequences for both reason and its purported Other(s) ... You cannot give up all friendship, friendship as such, without damaging yourself.’

Woodrow Wilson was once thought of as a progressive’s progressive. Christopher Cox explains why that is no longer the case in his new book Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn. Sean Durns reviews:

Wilson’s career has been the subject of thousands of books. But Cox’s work is the first accessible account of Wilson’s battle against another key issue that came to the fore during his presidency: enfranchisement. Simply put: Wilson didn’t believe that either women or African Americans were qualified to vote. For reasons of political expediency, he would, at times, try to mask this fact. But, as Cox demonstrates, Wilson had beliefs that were retrograde at best.

“It was in many ways unfortunate,” writes Cox, “that Wilson, whose early writings at Princeton declared universal suffrage to be ‘the foundation of every evil in this country,’ came to occupy the White House just as the national movement for women’s suffrage approached a tipping point.” Wilson “was superbly unsuited for the moment.”

Oxford at war: “It’s said that Oxford was spared destruction on the scale of Coventry because Adolf Hitler wanted the place as his capital after he conquered England. Ashley Jackson’s engrossing new book describes how the city of dreaming spires woke up to the realities of the Second World War. His trawl through the archives has yielded a rich and glittering haul, containing much that will interest more people than mere Oxonians.”