Mid-Victorian Britain 1851-75

PAST PRESENT - What's new in History

Mid-Victorian Britain was a period of enormous confidence and economic expansion for Britain. Geoffrey Best (http://www.britac.ac.uk/fellowship/elections/2003/best_g.cfm) gives us a history of great lucidity and readability. The Great Exhibition of 1851 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Exhibition) in fact represented the high-water mark of Victorian society, and the two decades which followed form one of the most fascinating and fruitful areas of British […]

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Aesthetics: the classic readings by David E. Cooper

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

David E. Cooper, Professor of Philosopy at Durham, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E_Cooper) has put together this volume of writings about the theory of beauty. Possibly on the esoteric side, nevertheless whole academic careers have been devoted to it. Authors represented are Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Hume, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Bell, Dewey, Heidegger and Collingwood. Hume and Schopenhauer are

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Stuff

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Before the microscope thinkers had speculated about what the world is made of at the minutest level. The miroscope introduced evidence for the first time and it has revolutionised our knowledge of the world and the organisms that inhabit it. In the seventeenth century the pioneering work of two scientists, the Dutchman Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and

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The ‘Tempest’ and its travels by Peter Hulme

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

It’s a contentious matter as to which of Shakespeare’s plays is the greatest. Some say ‘King Lear’, others say ‘Hamlet’. For my money ‘Measure for Measure’ is right up there, but ‘The Tempest’ is the greatest play. It was the last to be written and seems to encapsulate the Bard’s best wisdom. Here, for example, is

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Complexity: A Guided Tour

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? In this remarkably clear and companionable book, leading complex systems scientist Melanie Mitchell (http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mm/) provides an intimate tour of the sciences of complexity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity), a broad set

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The Storyteller

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times

Jodi Picoult (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodi_Picoult and http://www.jodipicoult.com/) has legions of devoted readers, currently having some 14 million copies of her books in print worldwide. She received an A.B. in creative writing from Princeton University and a master’s degree in education from Harvard. She is the author of seventeen novels including My Sister’s Keeper (now a major film starring Cameron Diaz

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A New History of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

Anthony Kenny (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Kenny) has produced a monumental work for the general reader on the history of Western philosophy. Not many heroic attempts on this scale have been made since that of Bertrand Russell in 1945 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Western_Philosophy) and (http://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Western-Philosophy-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415325056/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387469626&sr=8-1&keywords=russell+history+of+western+philosophy) Kenny’s work was originally published in 4 parts as follows: Kenny, A. (2004) Ancient Philosophy: A New

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