One day long ago in Dublin, Dean Jonathan Swift had some fun at the expense of his friend, Bishop George Berkeley.

Is human thought no more than an accidental bi-product of brain activity: what David Hume described as "this little agitation of the brain?"

Even more puzzling than the mystery of how thought becomes action and how actions cause thoughts is "the hard problem" - that great enigma we call consciousness.

How do thoughts cause actions and how can "real world" events prompt perception and thought?  This is the enigma that philosophers call the "mind body problem."  Descartes postulated that the necessary mediation between mental and material activity occurs in the pineal gland at the front of the brain, but as an explanation this was speculative, implausible and inadequate. To-date nobody has proposed a satisfactory answer to the mind body problem.

Why do intelligent people use arguments they know to be spurious?

How the initial hope engendered by the French Revolution gave way to despair as the old tyranny was replaced by a new one.

The short-lived beauty and all-too-short lives of the sunflowers of the South Charante.

Although it was a long way from the trenches, the village of Châtignac in South-Central France was devastated by the First World war, but so also were tens of thousands of other little French villages.

A reader sends a stern letter to a newspaper editor - not about Iraq, Israel or Afghanistan, but on a point of grammar.

Like Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld still denies that the decision to invade Iraq was wrong.