The 2025 Booker Prize winner might be the best option to finish your reading programme this year. The author, David Szalay, (David Szalay interview: ‘I wanted to write about what it’s like to be a living body in the world’ | The Booker Prizes), was born in Montreal in 1974 in a Jewish family of a […]
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Published originally in German as Die Ringe des Saturn. Eine englische Wallfahrt (1995), translated as The Rings of Saturn (1998) – with its curious archive of photographs – records a walking tour in August 1992 of the East Anglian coast and in Suffolk. Many observations and subjects enter the mind of its narrator Winfried Georg Sebald (1944-2001) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._G._Sebald and W. G.
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Tristan Gooley (Tristan Gooley – The Natural Navigator) is an author and naturalist. He set up his natural navigation school in 2008 and is the author of award-winning books, including The Natural Navigator (2010), The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues & Signs (2014), How to Read Water (2016), The Secret World of Weather (2021), The Hidden Seasons (2025), some of the world’s only books covering natural navigation.
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‘Dark Academia’ (12 of the best dark academia books of all time) is a genre of fiction attracting a lot of attention. Its aesthetic centres on higher education, traditional lifestyles, Gothic architecture, ancient art and poetry, classical literature, elite college life, psychological manipulation, and the embrace of darkness. To try out this genre reach for
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There are many ‘dubh lochs’ on the Isle of Lewis in The Outer Hebrides. The island is studded with lochs which are coloured dark by the underlying peat. One of the civil parishes on the island is even called Lochs. This book is a follow-up to The Lewis Trilogy by Peter May (Peter May author
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Anthropologists having being studying ritual in human societies on a formal basis since Emile Durkheim (1858—1917) (Durkheim, Emile | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Ritual is a condensed event within a human society that contains a high degree of symbolism. Building on a solid body of scholarship about ritual, this author connects the findings with neuroscience.
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Ann Cleves (Ann Cleeves) has been delighting readers with her mystery crime fiction since 1986. She has given us the characters Vera Stanhope, Jimmy Perez and Matthew Venn. The author is in fine form with The Long Call (2019), and the summary is as follows: It’s North Devon where the rivers Taw and Torridge converge and
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Imagine a new political party in the UK. It launches as the ‘Anti-Democratic Party’. Its purpose is clearly and unambiguously stated. It promises to abolish democracy and replace it with a dictatorship in the UK. The Houses of Parliament will be turned into an upmarket shopping mall. During campaigning it does not use any form
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It is early June 2025 and the headline news covers a spat between the world’s richest man and the the world’s most powerful man (Opinion | Musk and Trump’s Twitter Fight Reveals How Power Works Today – POLITICO). It is not edifying. Comparison with the finer specimens of humanity in its history speaks to another
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