Fiction can take the reader into strange and surprising lives. Jenny Zhang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Zhang_(writer)) is a frank and subversive interpreter of the immigrant experience in America. Her stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a state school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. […]
In The Cradle of Thought Peter Hobson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hobson), a Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the Tavistock Clinic and the University of London, examines how thought develops in infants, looking at the subsequent differences in the quality of thinking between individuals and what this suggests about the place of thought in the history of evolution. At the
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In this collection 15 writers consider the impact of their bilingualism on the development of their craft. All agree that, in some sense, it was precisely the feeling of not quite fitting into their surroundings that made them writers at all. Amy Tan, Josef Skvorecký, Ariel Dorfman, Leonard Michaels, Luc Sante and others look back
The Genius of Language by Wendy Lesser Read More »
This is a landmark work on the human institution of slavery. Entire conferences and world wide debates have centred round it since first publication in 1980. Moses I. Finley (https://www.britac.ac.uk/impact-moses-finley) works to gain an understanding of what slavery meant to the ancients. He locates the origins of ancient slavery in the need for cheap labour which
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Why is the Earth not shaped as a smooth sphere like a marble? Why are there immensely deep trenches under the oceans and mountains towering into the sky? Devil in the Mountain is the story of scientist Simon Lamb (https://thiniceclimate.org/simon-lamb), and his attempt to grapple with this great geological question. The truth, like the devil, is in
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In September 2017 I had the privilege of fulfilling a long standing ambition. I visited Dr Johnson’s House in Gough Square, London. (http://www.drjohnsonshouse.org/) Having enjoyed his essays and literary criticism for 35 years, it’s plain to me the man had more wit, style and humanity than many civilizations I could name. To immerse yourself in
Samuel Johnson by Walter Jackson Bate Read More »
Alan Boss (http://home.dtm.ciw.edu/users/boss/) has been a key scientist with the Kepler space telescope. He believes Earth-like worlds are common in the galaxy, and hence life itself to be ubiquitous. In Crowded Universe he offers a first-hand account of the race to discover the first truly Earth-like exoplanet. The story picks up pace as more and more exoplanet discoveries
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Remember the hilarious 1966 film ‘One Million Years B.C.’ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060782/) featuring Raquel Welch in a bear skin and her co-star John Richardson? They are portrayed having to fend off dinosaurs. Hilarious because dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago, whilst modern humans (‘homo sapiens’) only appeared around 200,000 years ago. So the discrepancy was a
In China, the year 1997 was marked by the death of Deng Xiaoping, the country’s leader for two decades, and the return of Hong Kong from British rule. Peter Hessler (http://www.peterhessler.net/) spent two years teaching English literature in a small town on the Yangtze, and observed Chinese political life first hand. He is able to
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