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Plato's Republic is the central work of the Western world's most famous philosopher. Essentially an inquiry into morality, Republic also contains crucial arguments and insights into many other areas of philosophy. In these videos Robin Waterfield, editor of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Republic, explains why we should read it, and what makes Plato so interesting.

By Dennis Baron A a research report in the journal Science suggests that smartphones, along with computers, tablets, and the internet, are weakening our memories. This has implications not just for the future of quiz shows--most of us can't compete against computers on Jeopardy--but also for the way we deal with information: instead of remembering something, we remember how to look it up. Good luck with that when the internet is down.

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By Louis René Beres

Today, Israel’s leadership, continuing to more or less disregard the nation’s special history, still acts in ways that are neither tragic nor heroic. Unwilling to accept the almost certain future of protracted war and terror, one deluded prime minister after another has sought to deny Israel’s special situation in the world. Hence, he or she has always been ready to embrace, unwittingly, then-currently-fashionable codifications of collective suicide.

In Washington, President Barack Obama is consciously shaping these particular codifications, not with any ill will, we may hope, but rather with all of the usual diplomatic substitutions of rhetoric for an authentic intellectual understanding. For this president, still sustained by an utterly cliched “wisdom,” peace in the Middle East is just another routine challenge for an assumed universal reasonableness and clever presidential speechwriting.

Human freedom is an ongoing theme in Judaism, but this sacred freedom can never countenance a “right” of collective disintegration. Individually and nationally, there is always a binding Jewish obligation to choose life. Faced with the “blessing and the curse,” both the solitary Jew, and the ingathered Jewish state, must always come down in favor of the former.

Today, Israel, after Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement,” Ehud Olmert’s “realignment,” Benjamin Netanyahu’s hopes for “Palestinian demilitarization,” and U.S. President Barack Obama’s “New Middle East,” may await, at best, a tragic fate. At worst, resembling the stark and minimalist poetics of Samuel Beckett, Israel’s ultimate fate could be preposterous.

True tragedy contains calamity, but it must also reveal greatness in trying to overcome misfortune.

For the most part, Jews have always accepted the obligation to ward off disaster as best they can.

For the most part, Jews generally do understand that we humans have “free will.” Saadia Gaon included freedom of the will among the most central teachings of Judaism, and Maimonides affirmed that all human beings must stand alone in the world “to know what is good and what is evil, with none to prevent him from either doing good or evil.”

For Israel, free will must always be oriented toward life, to the blessing, not to the curse. Israel’s binding charge must always be to strive in the obligatory direction of individual and collective self-preservation, by using intelligence, and by exercising disciplined acts of national will. In those circumstances where such striving would still be consciously rejected, the outcome, however catastrophic, can never rise to the dignifying level of tragedy.

The ancient vision of authentically “High Tragedy” has its origins in Fifth Century BCE Athens. Here, there is always clarity on one overriding point: The victim is one whom “the gods kill for their sport, as wanton boys do flies.” This wantonness, this caprice, is precisely what makes tragedy unendurable.

With “disengagement,” with “realignment,” with “Palestinian demilitarization,” with both Oslo, and the Road Map, Israel’s corollary misfortunes remain largely self-inflicted. The continuing drama of a Middle East Peace Process is, at best, a surreal page torn from Ionesco, or even from Kafka. Here, there is nary a hint of tragedy; not even a satisfyingly cathartic element that might have been drawn from Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides. At worst, and this is the more plausible characterization, Israel’s unhappy fate has been ripped directly from the utterly demeaning pages of irony and farce.

Under former Prime

I have nothing against Hilary Mantel or Wolf Hall. But the time has come to be more discerning than just reading something because everyone else has read it, it's piled high in Waterstones and I'm mildly curious.

How many books can I read in my whole life? Or, more usefully, my remaining life? Of course, that depends how long is left. Looking at my family's record, I might have another 50 years. If I read a book a week, that's about 2,500 books to go. Some of those books haven't been published yet.

I can probably list many hundreds of books I know I want to read, or re-read. Wolf Hall is long, so I might have to swap out a couple of short James Joyce books and a volume of poetry to give it a slot. Or never re-read the Moomintroll books or Alan Garner. Worth it? I don't know without reading WH, but I'm guessing that, for me, it's not. If I have to choose between Tolstoy and Wolf Hall, Tolstoy will get the gig.

Some things I have to read for work, or to keep up. On the list for work at the moment are re-reading Plato's Timaeus and Critias, CP Snow's Two Cultures, IA Richards' Practical Criticism, maybe a quick refresher on Empsom and Leavis, and finishing (for the first time) Francine Prose's Reading like a Writer. Actually, I wasn't counting the work reading in the book a week, so these don't need to take any of the 2,500 slots. But these books are relevant as I'm (re)reading them in preparation for my new role as Royal Literary Fund Lector (title may change), which starts in September. And that's also why I'm thinking about which books are worth reading.

Lectorships are a new departure for the RLF. All professional writers, the lectors will run reading-aloud groups in the community. Initially, there will be groups in Cambridge, London, Sussex, Somerset, Yorkshire and Glasgow. The idea is to encourage the development of critical reading skills. The groups may target specific groups - elderly people, single parents, dentists, accountants, ex-convicts, people with ginger hair - it can be any kind of group. Or they may be open to anyone. How the group is advertised and made up is left to the discretion of each lector. All lectors have previously been (or currently are) RLF fellows. That means we've all done at least one stint in a university, and this is a chance to work with people outside an education setting.

The model for the sessions is Socratic dialogue, with a good deal borrowed from the tradition of Cambridge practical criticism. Each session (one and a half to two hours long) starts with participants reading aloud the selected text – a short story, a poem, or a piece of non-fiction - and then discussing it: what effect does it have? how does it work? does it work? It means reading slowly, savouring the choice of words, pausing to see how the punctuation works, following the thread of each sentence and unpicking it, learning how writing works at a detailed level. We hope it will help people with their own writing, and enjoy literature more fully. Becoming a critical reader will also mean they are better equipped to read all texts with an eye on how their response is constructed and how they might be being manipulated. A country filled with critical readers would give our political leaders and large corporations a much tougher time.

But that’s not all. It’s likely that many people who come to the groups will already be readers. The groups will – we hope – introduce them to a wider range of literature than they might have found on their own. If someone co

"In March the running water of the valley is bitter, acid cold, as snow on the fells begins to melt and is brought down over chilled rocks and icy beds. It has in it all the breaking soul of winter, thousands of dying flakes in one long, moving water-coffin."

That's a powerful nature scene written by novelist Sarah Hall, describing earth-shaking changes in a rural area in Europe. Her novel Haweswater captured the difficult lives of a 1930's farming community in England, a setting she'd memorized during her childhood.

Last year she stopped by for a practical interview about her craft, showing us how to turn the most familiar settings into evocative novel scenes. That interview was one of my most popular posts, and I'm reframing the whole entry for your reading pleasure.

As winter looms, trapping us inside our houses, we should all follow Hall's advice and turn the environment outside our window into vivid setting? Click here to learn how to describe nature in your stories.