Empires come and go. The relative strength of cultures around the globe wax and wane. Europe, arguably, has enjoyed a 500 year dominance. But how did its culture rise to achieve imperial influence? Tim Blanning (https://www.sid.cam.ac.uk/aboutus/people/person.html?crsid=tcb1000) offers some answers by giving an account of ‘the long 18th century’ (1648-1815). He begins with The Treaty of […]
The Pursuit of Glory Read More »
With a condescending smirk it’s easy to dismiss intellectuals as a bunch of inconsequential twits. Happily, they confine themselves to ‘ivory towers’ in places like Magdalen College, Oxford. Wrong! Intellectuals and thinkers of various stripes have had an enormous impact on the world and all who live in it. The consequence of their thought is profound. What
The Reckless Mind by Mark Lilla Read More »
Some books grow in repute over years as if by gestation. This novel by Michael Chabon (https://www.harpercollins.com/authors/michaelchabon) has quietly become something of a cult classic, readers smiling to themselves about its genius. I wonder if you’ll agree that it’s an astoundingly good read. The summary is as follows. Josef Kavalier smuggles himself out of occupied Prague
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon Read More »
Famously depicted as ‘Crookback Dick’, and as Shakespeare’s ‘bunch-back’d toad’, the murderer of the Princes in the Tower and the warrior vanquished at the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard III is one of England’s most enigmatic monarchs. Now, with the discovery of Richard’s bones under a car park in Leicester in 2012 and their reburial
This book takes the highly contentious position among historians that the Holy Roman Empire (http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/modern-europe/german-history/holy-roman-empire) was a stable and successful political structure. It is presented as a thematic history of the Empire from its medieval origins to its demise in 1806. In the first of four sections, ‘Ideal’, Peter Wilson shows the power of the imperial ambition:
The Holy Roman Empire Read More »
The year 2017 sees the 25th anniversary of Iain Banks’s novel of 1992 ‘The Crow Road’. The novel is the tale of Prentice McHoan and his complex Scottish family. Prentice, preoccupied with thoughts of sex, death, booze, drugs, and God, (which interesting person isn’t?) has returned to his home village of Gallanach full of questions about
The Crow Road by Iain Banks Read More »
Following on from the global success of his book ‘Sapiens’ (2014, http://sbr.lanark.co.uk/?p=5180 ), Yuval Noah Harari (http://www.ynharari.com/about/) offers us a terrifying vision of the life forms to which, even now, we are giving birth. For 70,000 years Homo sapiens has been the smartest life form on the planet. We love to think so. But one way to depict
Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari Read More »
When economists seek to explain Brexit, Donald Trump and the rise of populism/nationalism, the concept they most often reach for is ‘globalisation’. Goods and services, it seems, can be produced almost anywhere on the planet and consumed anywhere else, rapidly. This has had profoundly dislocating effects on patterns of employment, income and population movement over
The Great Convergence by Richard Baldwin Read More »
In each of our individual genomes we carry the history of the whole of our species. Since scientists first read the human genome in 2001 it has been subject to all sorts of claims, counterclaims and mythologising. Drawing together the latest discoveries in this rapidly changing area of science, Adam Rutherford (http://adamrutherford.com/) shows us that in
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford Read More »
