Our media, ‘legacy’ and contemporary, saturate us with crises: the cost of living crisis, the illegal migrant crisis, the Ukraine war crisis, the US tariff crisis, the epidemic of thieving crisis, the Scottish drug death crisis, the housing shortage crisis, the terrrorist threat crisis, the environmental damage crisis. Listen to all the dire warnings and […]
The Grapevine by Kate Kemp Read More »
Sarah Bakewell (About | Sarah Bakewell) has provided the reader with a really useful and enjoyable history of humanist freethinking over the past 700 years in this book. Be prepared to meet a large cast of characters who have contributed to the humanist outlook: Giovanni Boccaccio, Francesco Petrarca, Leontinus Pilatus, Niccolo Niccoli, Poggio Bracciolini, Aldus
Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell Read More »
This year, 2025, marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of ‘The Trial’ by Franz Kafka. One may often feel the world has gone nuts. In 2025 we hear that the 47th President of the United States is going to make Canada the 51st State, annex Greenland and turn Gaza into a luxury Mediterranean resort
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There can come a point in a reader’s life when the span of that life becomes history. Ian Kershaw’s (A life in writing: Ian Kershaw | History books | The Guardian and Ian Kershaw – Wikipedia) book ‘The Global Age’ covers the period 1950-2017, a time span that many will remember personally. The long shadow
The Global Age: Europe 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw Read More »
The chief source material for the guerrillas in this tale is the life of ‘Michael X’ (born Michael de Freitas, of mixed race, in Trinidad of a Portuguese father). (Michael X – Wikipedia) Adopting a black Muslim identity, de Freitas worked in London as a thug for Peter Rachman. Then, seeing the incontrovertible truth of
Guerrillas by V.S. Naipaul Read More »
The Nature of Normativity presents a complete theory about the nature of normative thought – that is, the sort of thought that is concerned with what ought to be the case, or what we ought to do or think. (Normativity in Metaethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)). Ralph Wedgwood (Sir Ralph Wedgwood, 4th Baronet – Wikipedia) defends
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The theme of this book is how best to educate a child. The subject’s mother deserts her husband, leaving young Richard behind. The boy is brought up by his father, Sir Austin Feverel, on strict educational principles. Being secluded at home and subjected to this regime does not prevent Richard falling in love with Lucy
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith Read More »
This story covers the period from 1957 to 1953. The setting is rural Mississippi, a landscape of baked clay and shacks with cinder yards. It relates the redneck poverty of David whose father drifts from job to job. Respectable folk shun the family because they cannot afford to pay church dues. When the father dies
The Neon Bible by John Kennedy Toole Read More »
Published 47 years after the death of its author, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs offers itself as the autobiography of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa’s alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, the work is beautifully translated by Richard Zenith in the Penguin Classics edition. Fernando Pessoa (Fernando Pessoa
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