Some 250 million years ago, the earth suffered the greatest biological crisis in its history. Around 95 percent of all living species died out – a global catastrophe far greater than the extinction of dinosaurs 185 million years later. Scientists are slowly working out how this happened and there are many competing theories. Some blame […]
The Enlightenment (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/) has been battered, abused, misrepresented and accused of leading to all sorts of horrors like the worst excesses of the French Revolution and Nazism. The vilification has been going on since its earliest appearance in Europe in the 1600s. This is mostly because it had deeply unsettling implications for established world views,
Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker Read More »
We step on and off aircraft these days routinely. Yet the action of a mammal flying through the air in a planned and directed manner in a machine is completely astonishing. The human ingenuity behind aviation is a marvel, and Tom D. Crouch (https://airandspace.si.edu/people/staff/tom-crouch) is your best guide to appreciating it in a single volume
The entire digital world in which we’re steeped, not to mention the power of technology and all modern convenience is all based on numbers. I Bernard Cohen’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._Bernard_Cohen) book here shows how this relation to our world only developed gradually. The author begins with the scientific revolution of the 17th century, which formulated the laws
The Triumph of Numbers by Bernard Cohen Read More »
There have been many attempts to define the demarcation between humans and other animals. Tool use, spirituality, complex language, moral intuition, culture have all been offered. In Catching Fire, Richard Wrangham (a British primatologist working at Harvard, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wrangham) argues that cooking really put us on the path to becoming homo sapiens. Almost 2 million years
No-one who has relished reading A Dance to the Music of Time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dance_to_the_Music_of_Time) will want to miss this monumental biography of Anthony Powell. Hilary Spurling (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/17/hilary-spurling-biographer-pearl-buck) lets us in on a huge amount of interesting detail about the novelist. There is the Eton schoolboy and Oxford undergraduate, a Parisian prostitute, Nina Hamnett (the artist’s model painted by
Anthony Powell by Hilary Spurling Read More »
Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris here offer detailed research on the place of religion in modern societies across the world. They point to a seemingly confusing picture. First, during the last century people in industrial societies have grown more secular. Second, ‘The world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever
Sacred and Secular by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris Read More »
Insects have been on planet Earth for approximately 400 million years. That predates Homo Sapiens by over 399 million years (Homo Sapiens having evolved by about 200,000 years ago). It’s a reasonable guess that the creepy crawlies will be here long after human extinction. Should you become fascinated by insects, you’ll want a splendid reference
Encyclopedia of Insects by Vincent Resh Read More »
You may remember Dante’s words “Midway upon the journey of our life/I found myself within a forest dark,/For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” In Nicole Krauss’ (https://www.nicolekrauss.com/) fourth novel, two characters travel to Israel to confront the aridity of their lives. One is a powerful, 68-year-old Manhattan attorney and philanthropist named Jules Epstein. The
