The fact that we have all moved at incredible speed into a ‘digital age’ is news to no-one. Laurence Scott, a critic and lecturer in English at King’s College London, is not so much interested in technology as the humans that use it – particularly our subtle transformation from analogue to digital beings. The author displays a […]
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Ever wonder what happens to your mortal remains after your spirit has taken the celestial elevator? Journalist and author Mary Roach (http://www.maryroach.net/) offers us this informative and humorous study of the human corpse. Human beings continue to die with alarming frequency: about 6,350 every hour at the last estimate (http://www.ecology.com/birth-death-rates/). That’s an awful lot of solid
Are you paying attention? Attention, according to Jesse Prinz (http://www.subcortex.com/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Prinz), is the key to understanding the phenomenon of consciousness. We don’t know for sure how the crumpled 3 pound gelantinous mass inside the skull produces the magic lantern show which is our waking experience. There are many theories. Synthesizing decades of research, The Conscious Brain advances
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Sarah Dunant (http://sarahdunant.com/) is probably best known for presenting the live BBC nightly culture programme The Late Show (1989-1996). After that she presented the BBC Radio 3 programme Night Waves. She is the author of 10 novels to date. One of her most enjoyable is The Birth of Venus (2003), set in late 15th Century Florence. The
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The novelist Molly Gloss (http://mollygloss.com/) has earned numerous awards, including an Oregon Book Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the PEN West Fiction Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award and a Whiting Writers Award. If you want a really ‘feel good read’ set in Oregon, The Hearts of Horses (2007) is for you. In the winter
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The prolific Nora Roberts (aka J.D. Robb, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nora_Roberts and http://noraroberts.com/ ) is entertaining us again this Autumn with Devoted in Death. The 51st title in this police procedure detective crime series, Robb’s world is clearly a dangerous place. There have been more murders than during an average sunny afternoon in Midsomer. The summary is as follows. It’s
Denis Healey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Healey) died on Saturday (3rd October 2015). He was a British politician of huge gravitas who found himself in government during a highly dangerous time for Britain, economically, in the 1970s. Standardly described as ‘the best Prime Minister Britain never had’, Healey possessed what a great many politicians today lack, namely a hinterland of
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