EGGHEAD CHOICE – Crack open for a hard boiled think

Polly Toynbee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Toynbee) turned 70 a few weeks ago. The celebrated Guardian columnist has got more sensible things to say than dozens of hair brained media pundits put together. To enjoy a book length exposition of her thoughts I’d start with Unjust Rewards, co-authored with David Walker. It concerns the obscene level of riches that […]

Lies, distortion, ignorance and falsity now saturate our culture. A fresh acme was reached during the US Presidential Trump campaign in late 2016 when ‘post-truth’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics) became celebrated. Fact checkers couldn’t keep count of the lies which were being spewed out. Thank goodness the cool voice of reason and a love of truth still exist.

Even something as quotidian and seemingly inconsequential as swearing can be subject to theory. Why do we swear, and what function does it fulfil? Can we infer anything from cultural or historical variations in the practice of swearing? Is it, for example, always intemperate behaviour, and always (in some form) aggressive? Is it always offensive?

The last person to have read most of the published output probably lived in the 1500s! No person can now read more than a microscopic fraction of the published word (in any of its many formats). Guides, literary criticism and anthologies can offer a tool for the bewildered. Literary criticism, particularly, not merely enthuses about authors and

E.M. Forster stated ‘Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him’. This is exactly the sentiment that inspired the physician and writer Raymond Tallis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Tallis) to pen his latest book, The Black Mirror: Fragments of an Obituary for Life. It contemplates a life looked back on from beyond; a meditation on being

We are all living poorer lives because of cheats, tax dodgers, criminals and the corrupt. The scale of wealth that is stolen from you should make you boil with rage. And it’s not just in hopelessly brutal and corrupt regimes in Africa, South America or Asia that it takes place. It’s in Europe and North America.

With a condescending smirk it’s easy to dismiss intellectuals as a bunch of inconsequential twits. Happily, they confine themselves to ‘ivory towers’ in places like Magdalen College, Oxford. Wrong! Intellectuals and thinkers of various stripes have had an enormous impact on the world and all who live in it. The consequence of their thought is profound. What

Following on from the global success of his book ‘Sapiens’ (2014, http://sbr.lanark.co.uk/?p=5180 ), Yuval Noah Harari (http://www.ynharari.com/about/) offers us a terrifying vision of the life forms to which, even now, we are giving birth. For 70,000 years Homo sapiens has been the smartest life form on the planet. We love to think so. But one way to depict