April 2013

Man, Beast and Zombie by Kenan Malik

Man, Beast and Zombie (2000) by Kenan Malik (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenan_Malik) investigates the historical roots, philosophical assumptions and alleged methodological problems of contemporary theories of human nature, in particular evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. Malik argues that, ‘The triumph of mechanistic explanations of human nature is as much the consequence of our culture’s loss of nerve as […]

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Possession by A.S. Byatt

Possession: A Romance is a 1990 bestselling novel by Antonia Byatt, sister of Margaret Drabble. It won the Booker Prize in 1990. Part historical as well as contemporary fiction, the title ‘Possession’ refers to issues of ownership and independence between lovers, the practice of collecting historically significant cultural artefacts, and to the possession that a biographer feels for

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The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan

A long time ago my Grandfather presented me with a hardback copy of Cosmos (1980, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cosmos-Carl-Sagan/dp/0394502949/ref=sr_1_1_twi_har_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517153106&sr=1-1&keywords=cosmos+sagan) by Carl Sagan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan), the great American popularizer of science and cosmology. With over 250 full-colour illustrations, many of them never before published, it was based on the author’s thirteen-part television series. I was mesmerised and spent many hours

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Traffics and Discoveries

Traffics and Discoveries (1904) is a collection of short stories, mostly South African or technological in emphasis, and with accompanying poems. ‘The Captive’, ‘A Sahib’s War’, and ‘The Comprehensions of Private Copper’ reproduce the flavour of Kipling’s early stories about the lower ranks in the context of the Boer War. The same knowing narrator who recorded

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