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), […]
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John Fowles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fowles) offers us an immaculate recreation of Victorian England entwined with a tale of passion and obsession in this novel of 1969. This story is familiar as it was brought to the screen in a brilliant film adaptation of 1981 with Meryl Streep as Sarah Woodruff and Jeremy Irons as Charles Henry Smithson. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082416/?ref_=sr_1).
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Margaret Atwood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Atwood) is one of the finest living writers of English language fiction. In an imagined dystopian future we are given the story of Offred, a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, once the United States, an oppressive world where women are no longer allowed to read and are valued only as long as they
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Ursula Le Guin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Le_Guin) published The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969. Her work, like a great deal of science fiction/fantasy is really about human life and human existence rather than exotic places in the Galaxy. This is the story of ‘Winter’, an Earth-like planet where the weather conditions are semi-arctic and the inhabitants are
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The Leopard was first published posthumously in 1958 in Italian as ‘Il Gattopardo’. In Sicily in 1860, as Italian unification grows inevitable, the smallest of gestures seems dense with meaning and melancholy, sensual agitation and disquiet: ‘Some huge irrational disaster is in the making.’ All around him, the prince, Don Fabrizio, witnesses the ruin of the
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In this novel of 1924 Thomas Mann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann) offers us a dizzyingly rich book of ideas. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps – a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and
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This a 1967 book, written in the late 1930s, by Mikhail Bulgakov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bulgakov) It is an intriguing read and has acquired something of a cult status. Written during the darkest period of Stalin’s repressive regime, it is a satire on Soviet life. The book combines two parts: one set in contemporary Moscow and the other
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Based on Mailer’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Mailer) own experience of military service in the Philippines during World War Two, The Naked and the Dead is a graphically truthful and shattering portrayal of ordinary men in battle. First published in 1949, as America was still basking in the glories of the Allied victory, it altered forever the popular perception of
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This fantastically rich novel (1980) from Umberto Eco (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco) is set in Italy in the Middle Ages. It is not only a narrative of a murder investigation in a monastery in 1327, but also a chronicle of the 14th century religious wars, a history of monastic orders, and a compendium of heretical movements. A thick slab
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