EGGHEAD CHOICE – Crack open for a hard boiled think

Britain is a meritocracy in which the brightest and most hard working rise to occupy top positions irrespective of background, right? Wrong. Jeremy Paxman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Paxman) has no trouble in relieving you of that fantasy. Friends in High Places (originally published 1991) is a handy chapter-by-chapter guide to the main groupings – politicians, civil servants, academics, the great and the

In Defence of Wonder is a set of  lively and provocative essays. Polymath Raymond Tallis (http://www.raymondtallis.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Tallis) exposes woolly thinking and pulls the rug from beneath a wide range of commentators whether scientist, theologian, philosopher, or pundit. He takes to task much of contemporary science and philosophy, arguing that they are guilty of taking us down every narrowing

The problem of the ultimate causes of evil, especially human strife and suffering, has agitated people’s minds from the beginning of history. The problem was particularly acute for the Christian tradition, with its faith in an all-loving and all-powerful God. A whole branch of theology, ‘theodicy’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy), developed to deal with this problem. Good recommendations

John Leslie Mackie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._L._Mackie) gives a carefully considered account of the arguments for and against the existence of God. His view is that, in the light of these arguments, it is a miracle that theism persists. The book has two main parts. In the first we get a discussion of the traditional arguments for the existence

Why is belief so hard to shake? Despite our best attempts to embrace rational thought and reject superstition, we often find ourselves appealing to unseen forces that guide our destiny, wondering who might be watching us as we go about our lives, and imagining what might come after death. In this lively and masterfully argued

Latvian-born Oxford historian Isaiah Berlin (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin) was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. He was an activist of the intellect who marshalled vast erudition and eloquence in defence of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political plurality. The essays in The Crooked Timber of Humanity expose the links between

In the winter of 1417 the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini made a great discovery. In an abbey in Germany he came across a manuscript of a long-lost classical poem, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”). This event is vividly described by the renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Greenblatt) in The Swerve. The author sees

Part of the ‘Little History’ series (http://www.littlehistory.org/) from Yale University Press this book takes on a very big subject: the glorious span of literature from Greek myth to graphic novels, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter. John Sutherland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sutherland_(author)) is perfectly suited to the task. He has researched, taught, and written on virtually every area of literature, and his infectious