Lisa Jardine has died on 25 October 2015. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11955153/Lisa-Jardine-historian-obituary.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Jardine) Daughter of Jacob Bronowski, she became a brilliant historian, Renaissance scholar, humanist and polymath. Everything I have read of hers has been a pleasure and an education. Hers was the voice of sanity, erudition and wisdom. Selecting only one of her works is difficult, but please read Ingenious […]

Professor Joshua Greene (http://www.joshua-greene.net/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Greene_(psychologist)) is the director of Harvard University’s Moral Cognition Lab. He offers a grand synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy here. His thesis in this book, Moral Tribes, is as follows. Human brains have evolved for tribal life, for getting along with a select group of others (‘Us’). Our hominid ancestors had to fight off everyone else (‘Them’). Modern

If you’ve ever thought the social class system in Britain was a thing of the past, think again. Professor Mike Savage of The London School of Economics (http://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/whoswho/academic/savage.aspx) shows in this book, Social Class in the 21st Century, that it is as entrenched as ever. The author, with a team of sociologists responsible for the

Perhaps at this very moment you are lusting after an iPhone 12 Pro? How about a new BMW Series 7 in Ruby Black Metallic finish? A new luxury fitted kitchen? Expensive holidays in exotic locations that take a huge amount of jet fuel to get to? The very latest designer label clothes, handbags, shoes? The

We think of ‘the countyside’ as a place of nature into which we can escape for refreshment. It offers a break from the dismal treadmill of our ant like endeavours in urban life. Yet there is practically nothing left of pristine wilderness in these, our British Isles. Humans have for so long been hunting, chopping,

Professor Clay Shirky (http://web.archive.org/web/20110102195231/ http://www.shirky.com/bio.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky) of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program offers us this analysis of a phenomenon which has rapidly become a feature of modern life – social media. Shirky argues that Web tools are now flexible enough to match and shape human social relationships. He shows we are flattening organisational cultures while assembling “rungs