Set in an unnamed African country after independence, the book is narrated by Salim, an ethnically Indian Muslim and a shopkeeper in a small, growing city in the country’s remote interior. Salim observes the rapid changes in Africa with an outsider’s distance. What he sees is chaos, violent change, warring tribes, ignorance, isolation, poverty and a lack […]
A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul Read More »
Anthony Burgess (1917 -1993, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Burgess) was a lapsed Catholic from Manchester who was not merely a prolific writer but composer as well. His Catholic background left defining influences in his thought and Earthly Powers (1980) is an epic investigation of human fallibility, the exercise of power, and of corruption. On his eighty-first birthday, retired gay writer
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Philosophical scepticism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_skepticism) comes in a variety of flavours and strengths and is strongly represented in the classical period. It is time well spent to pick out the various strands. The best recent rebuttal I’ve read is from the pen of public intellectual and prolific author Anthony (‘A.C.’) Grayling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._C._Grayling) in a 1985 publication ‘The Refutation of Scepticism‘. Put
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Catherine Vernon heads up the family bank in Redborough. She has been jilted in her youth like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, and as a result casts a jaundiced eye on just about everything. Her iron will has brought her to prominence and losing control over any event in her purview is not to be
Hester by Margaret Oliphant Read More »
Charles Dickens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens) managed to conjure up in his fiction a world which is so quintessentially British that practically all subsequent literary works from these islands fall under his shadow. His characters are so memorable that they remain gloriously fixed in our imagination, whilst versions of his narratives are permanently being screened in cinema, performed on stage, or aired on television to this
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There was a day and age when rural peasants in England scarcely journeyed outwith the sight of their local parish church spire. Young beauty Tess Durbeyfield’s village is Marlot in Dorset. In order to escape her rural poverty Tess (whom Hardy describes as ‘a pure woman’) follows a clue that the family might be connected to nobility. In
Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy Read More »
This book is a landmark achievement in anthropology and evolutionary biology from the polymath Jared Diamond. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond) It is no less than a wholescale assessment of human existence. How did we evolve to dominate so many other species and what is the long term future for a creature that shares 98% of its genes with chimpanzees?
The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond Read More »
This book is a one volume introduction to Western intellectual history. Richard Tarnas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Tarnas) takes us on a journey from the Greeks to postmodernism. The contemporary world of postmodern thought, according to Tarnas, is caught “between the inner craving for a life of meaning and the relentless attrition of existence in a cosmos that our rational
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Nausea (La Nausée, 1938) is the diary of one Antoine Roquentin whose systematic introspection leads him into a frame of mind in which he senses himself absolutely free in a meaningless world. He is overcome with a dizzying nausea to understand that with the radical contingency of freedom comes responsibility – a responsibility to invest
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