Never before have I been interested in portraits. And yet, for some reason, at the National Gallery, I found myself staring into faces.

As is often the case, while I was working on that mammoth project, a podcast popped up which referred to my current preoccupation.

The other day I received an email from Dabinder Basra. The name was vaguely familiar but I wasn't sure from where.

I do feel that this is an important document and that it sheds light on some of our current concerns.

It somewhat astonishes me that I am doing this. But there we go.

Education is so important. The arts can provide an alluring and engaging path to self-understanding, empathy and ethical development.

So, the last post on John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty' was a long one... now, I warn you, this one is too. And it's not the end...

This post is a mistake. A huge mistake. I wanted to look something up in John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty' and ended up getting carried away.

I have known people who have created a fantasy and live in a delusion. This can be empowering, but seems likely to be destructive.

The word altruism comes from a root meaning others - hence 'othersism' is a good definition.

Am I alone? The one real screwer-upper among my middle class friends? It's possible. It really is possible.

I agree with Bob Solomon that emotions are not entirely under our control, but that they are more under our control than we like to admit.

It's not simply a case of being conscious or not conscious of emotional experiences: there is a whole scale of awareness.

I have just read this on Aeon and it chimes with much that I have written on these pages - though expressed far more eloquently.

They are moments of living art, when the self is shaped by the finest artist.

Who is this 'I' who is paying attention? That's another step into the mystery world of consciousness that none of these meditators explain.

Sophie-Grace Chappell is writing a book on epiphanies. And I remembered that three and a half years ago, I wrote to her.

We live as flesh and blood bodies with emotional reactions and, frankly, that matters more to us than all the axioms and statistics.

This life has depth - and 'having soul' in this sense means that, along with passion come conflicted, complex and agonistic experiences.

Emotions aren't just little butterfly feelings without much context or consequence, but real signals of our world view.