The Politics of Sex and Other Essays On Conservatism, Culture and Imagination

These essays cover topics as radically diverse as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Václav Havel, The Magic Flute and Viz magazine. All have been published before, and many have already proved controversial. The author, a leading Oakeshott scholar, contributes frequently to the TLS . Witty, moving and erudite, his prose is also conspicuously graceful and clear. This collection is addressed as much to the educated general reader as to the academic specialist. It includes an otherwise almost unobtainable exchange with Sir Isaiah Berlin.

PART ONE: PRACTICE VERSUS THEORY Conservatism: An Outline Edmund Burke Michael Oakeshott The Unknown Oakeshott Writer and Ideology: Three Case-Studies The Disenchanted Flute: Opera and the Rule of the Concept PART TWO: CULTURE AND SOCIETY On Culture The Politics of Sex The Politics of Death Culture, Technology and Value Organic Society: A Note Four Cheers for Normality Home Truths: C.R. Mackintosh and the House Beautiful PART THREE: THE TRUTH OF FICTION Religion, Art and the Limits of the Sayable Statecraft and Metapolitics in Shakespeare Jane Austen: Ethics And Social Order Trollope, Tact and Virtue Tolstoy and Enlightenment: An Exchange with Isaiah Berlin Aerodromes and Aspidistras: The Worlds of Thirties Fiction The Survivor's Guilt: Wiesel and Sciascia Index

ROBERT GRANT is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. A Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge from 1970 to 1973, he has lately (1999) been Visiting Research Fellow at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He is the author of Oakeshott, and of nearly one hundred essays, articles and reviews. He is a frequent contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and to Radio Scotland's The Colin Bell Programme. He has lectured widely in the USA and Eastern Europe.