June 2014

Hildegard of Bingen by Sabina Flanagan

Belatedly canonized on 7 October 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI, Christian mystic and visionary Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179) (http://www.hildegard-society.org/faq.html) had been revered in the Roman Catholic Church for centuries. Apart from her work as an abbess of a Benedictine convent, and for her scholarship, Hildegard is one of the earliest known composers in the Western […]

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The Kill Switch

American veterinarian James Paul Czajkowski (born August 20, 1961, pen-name James Rollins, http://www.jamesrollins.com/) writes best-selling, action-adventure, thriller novels. He gave up his veterinary practice in  Sacramento, California, to be a full-time author. He has also published fantasy fiction under the nom-de-plume of James Clemens. The summary of his latest thriller (15 May 2014) is as follows.

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Berlin Noir

Edinburgh born Philip Kerr (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Kerr) and (http://www.philipkerr.org/) has served up some pretty successful historical crime/thrillers set in Germany and elsewhere during the 1930s, the Second World War and the Cold War. Should you wish to immerse yourself in these shady worlds and gain an introduction to the work of Kerr I’d recommend this compilation. It brings

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Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

If  inequality doesn’t bother you a bit – turn away. If you believe it’s an obscenity that the rich can stash away £13 trillion in offshore investment accounts in order to avoid tax (http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-07-22/news/32788549_1_tax-havens-tax-justice-network-investment-bank) whilst the poor are ground into the dust, made to work harder every day and have their income reduced – this

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The Opium of the Intellectuals by Raymond Aron

Few works of economic and political analysis are worth reading 60 years after publication. The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955), by French intellectual Raymond Aron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Aron) is one of them. The author shows how noble ideas can slide into the tyranny of secular religion and emphasizes how political thought has the profound responsibility of telling the

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Selfish Whining Monkeys by Rod Liddle

Journalist and polemicist Rod Liddle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Liddle) likes to ‘mix it up’. I heard about Selfish Whining Monkeys (2014) on Radio 4’s ‘Start the Week’ on Monday. It sounded enjoyably provocative. Here is the trade description: ‘With a sharp eye for the magnificently absurd, Rod Liddle sets light to modern-day Britain. In the western world, on

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Want You Dead

 In ‘Whispers of Immortality‘ by T.S. Eliot we find the following lines: ‘Webster was much possessed by death, And saw the skull beneath the skin, And breastless creatures underground, Leaned backward with a lipless grin’. Peter James might equally be described as ‘possessed by death’ because the word dead appears in the title of all ten

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