FANTASTIC FICTION – Escapes to other places and other times

Steven Pinker (http://stevenpinker.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker), Professor of Psychology at Harvard, is truly one of the big beasts of academia. One suspects that he must suffer from headaches because it seems he’s got six brains inside one skull. Not content to confine his research to learned journals Pinker has published, amongst other titles, The Language Instinct (1994), […]

Interested in sex? No? OK, you need not read this recent history of social attitudes towards the grisly function. Philip Larkin famously wrote in ‘Annus Mirabilis’ Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) – Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP.  The observation is both

Written by an anonymous English monk during the late fourteenth century, The Cloud of Unknowing is a sublime expression of what separates God from humanity and is widely regarded as a hallmark of Western literature and spirituality.  It stands in the tradition of the ‘Via Negativa’. This suggests that one must give up all conceptual

American thriller writer Clive Cussler (http://clive-cussler-books.com/) has seen over 50 titles published under his name. He has had 17 consecutive titles reach The New York Times fiction best seller list. His fiction leans toward the fantastical and glamorous and is powerfully plot driven. In this outing of 2012 we are introduced to the greatest advance in American defense

Simon Kernick (http://www.simonkernick.com/about/) has been steadily building a reputation for himself as a thriller writer over the last decade. As in many an episode of ‘Spooks’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spooks) the authorities have a limited time to prevent the unimaginable happening. The brief synopsis for this 2013 title is as follows. It’s 8am and an explosion blasts through a cafe in

Ever since the publication of Bravo Two Zero in 1993 SAS Sergeant Andy McNab (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_McNab) has had an ardent following for the gritty realism of his military action thrillers. The gripping 2012 follow-up to the bestselling War Torn has the following synopsis. Writing with Kym Jordan, Andy McNab has created a stunning sequel to his bestselling novel

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man This is Joyce’s semi-autobiographical portrait of his alter ego Stephen Dedalus as he struggles free from his Irish Catholic heritage and of his eventual abandonment of Ireland. The portrait begins with Stephen as a young child, listening to the talk around the dinner table of Irish

The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age  The Professor of Human Biology at Stanford (http://nathanwolfe.net/) tells a chilling tale. The virus has probably been around since the evolution of the first cell. This is a teensy bit longer than humans have been around. Three and a half billion years longer, actually. So

Scotland’s own Val McDermid writes what has become known as ‘Tartan Noir’. Some of her offerings are seriously not for the faint hearted. They hover, with lovingly painted detail, over graphic scenes of violence and torture. For a gentle introduction to her oeuvre try The Last Temptation. The plot goes as follows. A twisted killer