Book review: Culture by Terry Eagleton

Yale, £16.99

The term “culture” has had a lot of heavy lifting to do over the last couple of centuries. Its definition is now so capacious that it can cover almost anything that humans beings do—making tea, making love, jury trials, mowing the lawn, church services, golf—which represent culture as a way of life. It can also describe sets of aesthetic artefacts—high culture, popular culture, national culture, counterculture. And at various times, it has been considered the binary opposite of nature and also of civilisation, but then at other times capable of replacing…