EGGHEAD CHOICE – Crack open for a hard boiled think

Donald E. Brown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_E._Brown) offered this thesis in 1991. His own summary of human universals is that they “comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception.” We are all tiresomely familiar with the banal falsity that ‘everything is relative’. In the field of anthropology at least, Brown […]

In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the melancholy Jaques declares: “All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players.” This is a celebrated use of metaphor, a figure of speech in which one thing is used to describe another. As one of the central structural elements in human thought it is the habit,

George Steiner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Steiner) has enjoyed a spectacular academic career, teaching in many prestigious institutions and writing voluminously. He is a comparative literary critic and polymath. This is an anthology of his writings between 1978-1996. Topics covered are the Hebrew Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, tragedy, Simone Weil, Saint-Simone, Peguy, Husserl, dreams, Kafka, Kierkegaard, tautology, the two suppers

What can one say about A.C. Bradley’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._C._Bradley) Shakespearean Tragedy? This is a masterpiece of literary criticism that has enriched and influenced generations of students and lovers of Shakespeare since its publication in 1904. There is a beautiful lyrical poise and scholarly self-assurance in the work which makes one go back to read again (I

Social scientist and writer Malcom Galdwell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Gladwell) put forward this thesis in 2008 about what leads to success. He examines the case of The Beatles, Bill Gates and J. Robert Oppenheimer. He draws on cultural and social factors to show that it’s not all a complete mystery. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he points to sheer hard work, practice

This volume allows Bryan Magee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Magee) the length to set out the arguments of the great German pessimist. He is largely sympathetic to Schopenhauer. Firstly he takes over 100 pages to explain how Schopenhauer’s starting point is very much the ‘transcendental idealism’ of Immanuel Kant. Briefly put this is a stance that Kant arrived at

Nicholas Carr’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_G._Carr) contention is that the internet is rewiring our brains to negative effect. He is not merely talking about ‘dumbing down’. What he posits is more significant: that human culture has been built steadily over our literate history by deep and meditative reading, and the internet threatens to undo this process. Millions of people are

Jonathan Dollimore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Dollimore) tackles a huge theme here. It is the tangled topics of death, desire and loss in Western culture. His aim is to investigate the central paradox that desire is the bedfellow, so to speak, of loss and death. As he puts it ‘what connects death with desire is mutability–the sense that all being

Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson) argues for the position that there must be a fundamental unity to all truth across the sciences and humanities. This is a noble vision. Wilson sees its origin in the Ionian Greek belief that the cosmos is an orderly whole running by laws discoverable in thought. His own inspiration is