EGGHEAD CHOICE – Crack open for a hard boiled think

‘The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. . .’ So begins what is arguably Frank Raymond Leavis’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._R._Leavis and http://www.pro-europa.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=345:paul-dean-the-last-critic-the-importance-of-f-r-leavis-&catid=27:spirit&Itemid=61 and http://www.theguardian.com/books/1978/apr/18/classics.johnezard) most controversial book, The Great Tradition, an uncompromising critical and polemical survey of English fiction that was first published in 1948. He puts a powerful case for moral […]

In this comprehensive book E.J. Michael Witzel (http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Witzel) demonstrates the prehistoric origins of most of the mythologies of Eurasia and the Americas (‘Laurasia’). By comparing these myths with others indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa, Melanesia, and Australia (‘Gondwana Land’) Witzel is able to access some of the earliest myths told by humans. The Laurasian mythologies share

Simon Blackburn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Blackburn andhttp://www2.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/) puts forward a compelling and original philosophy of human motivation and morality. Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is our ethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers to such questions in an exploration of the nature of

Ivor Armstrong Richards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._A._Richards and https://archive.org/details/practicalcritici030142mbp  was one of the founders of modern literary criticism. He enthused a generation of writers and readers and was an influential supporter of the young T.S. Eliot. Principles of Literary Criticism was the text that first established his reputation and pioneered the movement that became known as the ‘New Criticism’. Highly

If a man supports Celtic one day and Rangers the next then he is fickle but not necessarily illogical. From this starting point, and assuming no previous knowledge of the subject, Wilfrid Hodges (http://wilfridhodges.co.uk/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfrid_Hodges) takes the reader through the whole gamut of logical expressions in a simple and lively way. Readers who are more mathematically adventurous