The Kill Room

Jeffery Deaver (http://www.jefferydeaver.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Deaver) practiced law before embarking on a successful career as a best-selling novelist. He has been awarded the Steel Dagger  and Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association and the Nero Wolfe Award, and he is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader’s Award for Best Short Story […]

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Affluenza by Oliver James

There is currently an epidemic of ‘affluenza’ throughout the world – an obsessive, envious, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses – that has resulted in huge increases in depression and anxiety among millions. Over a nine-month period, bestselling author Oliver James (http://www.selfishcapitalist.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_James_(psychologist)) travelled around the world to try and find out why. The author discovered how, despite very different cultures

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Shakespeare’s Language by Frank Kermode

What makes Shakespeare the greatest dramatist/poet, period? This masterpiece of literary criticism and elucidation will tell you what. It is, in itself, a marvellous achievement and a distillation of a lifetime of thinking. The finest tragedies written in English were all composed in the first decade of the seventeenth century, and it is generally accepted that the

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The Idea of the Holy by Rudolph Otto

A classic of religious philosophy, The Idea of the Holy (1917) by Rudolph Otto (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_Otto) has been revered by generations of lay readers as well as divinity students. In the work, Otto introduces the concept of the ‘numinous’ which he defines as a ‘non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the

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The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

When William James (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_james) went to the University of Edinburgh in 1901 to deliver a series of lectures on ‘natural religion’, he defined religion as ‘the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine’. Considering religion,

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Dark Witch

Ever popular Nora Roberts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nora_Roberts) has a new offering. The summary is as follows. With indifferent parents, Iona Sheehan grew up craving devotion and acceptance. From her maternal grandmother, she learned where to find both: a land of lush forests, dazzling lakes, and centuries-old legends. County Mayo, Ireland. Where her ancestors’ blood and magic have flowed

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Berlin

Why do we often have a fascination for the grisly facts of warfare? Is it because our behaviour in war reveals something about the truth of human nature? We find elements of the highest courage, heroism, self-sacrifice and utter brutality, cruelty, sadism, destructiveness. The outline of these features seem to stand out so much more

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