The tercentenary celebrations of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–91 prompted much new research on the subject. In 1988 and 1989 there were conferences, symposia, and exhibitions in Britain, the Netherlands and the United States. This is the first large-scale publication to emerge from the commemoration, and the first to attempt to bring together the main […]
The Anglo-Dutch Moment Read More »
Modern science is old enough now to have a history of its own histories, and Professors in Universities who specialize in the history of science. (e.g. Simon Schaffer at Cambridge, https://www.people.hps.cam.ac.uk/index/teaching-officers/schaffer). Looking back through the history and development of science is a great pleasure, and there are certain accounts which have stood out as highly
Science and the Secrets of Nature is the first major treatment of Renaissance ‘books of secrets’, and of the printers who produced them. ‘Books of secrets’ were collections of recipes for the manufacture of dyes, pigments, soap, and homemade medicines, which might also contain lore on the occult powers of plants. The most influential model for
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Moral philosophers don’t often get prizes for the lucidity of their writing. Many have a deplorable writing style. Difficulty in comprehension does not equal profundity of meaning, however. Every now and again a philosophy book comes along that shows the lie, and stands out for its clarity, directness, and accessibility. Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel
Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel Read More »
Anyone who has the highest admiration for David Hume, as I do, will welcome this book. Hume is the profoundest and most stylish philosopher ever to have written in English, but during his lifetime he was attacked as ‘the Great Infidel’. In contrast, Adam Smith was a revered professor of moral philosophy, and is now
The Infidel and the Professor by Dennis Rasmussen Read More »
Fiction can take the reader into strange and surprising lives. Jenny Zhang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Zhang_(writer)) is a frank and subversive interpreter of the immigrant experience in America. Her stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a state school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
In The Cradle of Thought Peter Hobson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hobson), a Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the Tavistock Clinic and the University of London, examines how thought develops in infants, looking at the subsequent differences in the quality of thinking between individuals and what this suggests about the place of thought in the history of evolution. At the
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In this collection 15 writers consider the impact of their bilingualism on the development of their craft. All agree that, in some sense, it was precisely the feeling of not quite fitting into their surroundings that made them writers at all. Amy Tan, Josef Skvorecký, Ariel Dorfman, Leonard Michaels, Luc Sante and others look back
The Genius of Language by Wendy Lesser Read More »
This is a landmark work on the human institution of slavery. Entire conferences and world wide debates have centred round it since first publication in 1980. Moses I. Finley (https://www.britac.ac.uk/impact-moses-finley) works to gain an understanding of what slavery meant to the ancients. He locates the origins of ancient slavery in the need for cheap labour which
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