An Autobiography by R.G. Collingwood

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

There are surprisingly few good autobiographies by philosophers. They tend to be disappointingly superficial and to give little sense of what it is like to be in the thrall of philosophical perplexity. Russell’s My Philosophical Development is an exception to this, and so too is Collingwood’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_G_Collingwood and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collingwood/) marvellous work, which, though militantly ‘internal’ and intellectual […]

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Bertrand Russell

LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

Born in 1872, son of Viscount Amberley, and heir to the Russell Earldom, Bertrand Russell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell/) was to become one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His early masterpiece Principia Mathematica,  set the course for the modern and post modern preoccupation with language; its philosophical ambitions are what drew Ludwig Wittgenstein from Vienna to

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The Man in the High Castle

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times

This is a dazzling speculative novel of ‘counterfactual history’ from one of America’s most highly-regarded science fiction authors. Philip K. Dick’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick) The Man in the High Castle (1962) gives us a horrifying glimpse of an alternative world – one where the Allies have lost the Second World War. In this nightmare dystopia the Nazis have taken

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The Public Burning

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times

Robert Coover’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Coover) controversial best-seller, The Public Burning (1977) has since emerged as one of the most influential novels of our time. The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use living historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the execution of alleged atomic spies Julius and

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Cocksure

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times

In the swinging culture of sixties’ London, Canadian Mortimer Griffin is a beleaguered editor adrift in a sea of hypocrisy and deceit. Alone in a world where nobody shares his values but everyone wants the same things, Mortimer must navigate the currents of these changing times. Richler’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordecai_Richler) eccentric cast of characters include the gorgeous Polly,

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