How did an obscure Jewish religious sect in Roman occupied Judea go from nothing to become the world’s most dominant organised religion? Why did any one of the hundreds of other obscure cults such as Mithraism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism) not meet with the same success? There have been hundreds of histories of Christianity, each positioned somewhere along the spectrum […]
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Some autobiographies are enjoyed for the content of their revelations, others for their style and quality of prose in which they are executed. Speak, Memory (1967) by Russian emigre Vladimir Nabokov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov) is certainly the latter. It offers a gorgeous and beguiling account of a pampered Russian childhood broken into fragments of exile and loss by revolutionary
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (1999) is about as easy as it gets to understand this subject matter. Matt Ridley is a science journalist and author. He is best known for his books on genetics, evolution and looking at human behaviour from an evolutionary viewpoint. Genome has one chapter for every
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The Rainbow (1915) shocked its first readers by its frankness about humans as incarnate beings. The body and its impulsive needs are central to this inter-generational tale and the truth of these things rings out like a silver coin thrown down on stone. The author has broken decisively with Victorian fiction. The novel is about
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This book (2008) has wonder in the title and is wonderful to read. Richard Holmes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Holmes_(biographer) is a biographer to trade and married to novelist Rose Tremain. This was his first major work of biography in over a decade. Holmes immerses us into the world where the Romantic spirit was being thrilled by the discoveries of science
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Flight Behaviour (2012) is the latest novel from Barbara Kingsolver (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Kingsolver and http://www.kingsolver.com/), who grew up in eastern Kentucky. It is in running towards a rendezvous with a lover that the principal character, Dellarobia Turnbow, a farmer’s wife, encounters what looks like a hillside on fire. In fact it is the sight of clouds of orange
This ultra-modernist tale of jazz age America from 1925 is much in the glare of publicity at the moment (May 2013) due to the release of another Hollywood film version (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343092/), this time with Leonardo diCaprio as Jay. F Scott Fitzgerald’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Fitzgerald and http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/index.html) famous work regularly tops polls of ‘best American novel ever written’ or even ‘best
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Man, Beast and Zombie (2000) by Kenan Malik (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenan_Malik) investigates the historical roots, philosophical assumptions and alleged methodological problems of contemporary theories of human nature, in particular evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. Malik argues that, ‘The triumph of mechanistic explanations of human nature is as much the consequence of our culture’s loss of nerve as
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Possession: A Romance is a 1990 bestselling novel by Antonia Byatt, sister of Margaret Drabble. It won the Booker Prize in 1990. Part historical as well as contemporary fiction, the title ‘Possession’ refers to issues of ownership and independence between lovers, the practice of collecting historically significant cultural artefacts, and to the possession that a biographer feels for
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