September 2014

We Are Our Brains by Dick Swaab

Nothing is more natural than to believe we have conscious control over our own choices. Indeed most of social behaviour including the criminal justice system is predicated on that conviction. What, though, if that presumption is simply not true? Professor Dick Swabb (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Swaab) argues that everything we think, do, and refrain from doing is determined by our

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The Girl Next Door

Ruth Rendell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Rendell and http://literature.britishcouncil.org/ruth-rendell) is a phenomenally successful crime writer. She probes deeply into the psychological background of criminals and their victims, many of them mentally afflicted or otherwise socially isolated. She has (at the last count) 74 titles to her name covering crime novels, novellas, and short stories (some under the pen name of Barbara

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The Soul of the World by Roger Scruton

I was alerted to this recent publication by hearing Roger Scruton (http://www.roger-scruton.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Scruton ) on the radio last week. The publisher’s outline is as follows. In The Soul of the World, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton defends the experience of the sacred against today’s fashionable forms of atheism. He argues that our personal relationships, moral intuitions, and aesthetic

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The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently by Kate Soper

This is one for those of you concerned with the environment. There is no doubt we are trashing our planet and that current levels of consumption are unsustainable. Alarm over the contribution of affluent lifestyles to global warming and environmental destruction is combining with growing disquiet over the damage affluence does to consumers themselves. Consumerism

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