Malcolm Bull’s early work included Seeing Things Hidden (1999) and The Mirror of the Gods (2005), staging encounters with continental theory and the history of art. He supplemented this more scholarly writing with a series of essays for the London Review of Books, including a powerful piece on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2001) that was published in that paper’s post-September 11th issue, dated 4th October, whose notoriety owes to some loose remarks by the Classicist Mary Beard but which stands out in the memory not only in virtue of Bull’s contribution but also because it contained a remarkable poem, ‘Pelagius’, by the late, great Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan. It is a body of work that makes sense in light of his institutional entanglements, teaching at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art on the one hand and a longstanding member of the editorial board of the New Left Review on the other. Over the last dozen years or so, however, Bull has been intruding more and more onto the territory of mainstream Anglophone political philosophy. There has still been important scholarship on art—Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth (2013) was a study of early eighteenth-century Neapolitan painting through eyes illuminated by the contemporary philosophy of Giambattista Vico who held the chair of rhetoric at the local University—but this is now accompanied by more straightforwardly political-theoretical writing than has appeared previously. The publication of Anti-Nietzsche (2011a), both bracing and salutary, marks the turn; the same year saw the publication of an article on egalitarianism in the New Left Review (2011b); more recently there has been a stimulating and idiosyncratic piece on ‘slack’ in Katrina Forrester and Sophie Smith’s collection on Nature, Action and the Future (2018); and now we have a short book—or, as Bull refers to it, an essay—on the unfashionable subject of mercy.