In Michael Frayn’s (http://literature.britishcouncil.org/michael-frayn and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Frayn) novel Spies (2002) an old man returns to the scene of his seemingly ordinary suburban childhood. Stephen Wheatley is unsure of what he is seeking but, as he walks once-familiar streets he hasn’t seen in 50 years, he unfolds a story of childish games colliding cruelly with adult realities. It is […]
What first prompted prehistoric man, sheltering in the shadows of deep caves, to call upon the realm of the spirits? And why has belief thrived since, shaping millennia of civilizations, thousands of generations of shamans, pharaohs, Aztec priests and Mayan rulers, Jews, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims and Scientologists? As our dreams and nightmares have changed over the
An Atheist’s History of Belief by Matthew Kneale Read More »
Soho in the Fifties and London half a century later form the two interlocking time frames for Maggie O’Farrell’s (http://www.maggieofarrell.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie_O%27Farrell) 2010 novel. A chance meeting in a Devon Lane between a bored graduate, Alexandra Sinclair, and a flamboyant older man with a broken-down car instigate events that, decades on, will have an unprecedented effect on new parents Elina and
The Hand That First Held Mine Read More »
In 1857 when Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley and his band of rum smugglers from the Isle of Man have most of their contraband confiscated by British Customs, they are forced to put their ship up for charter. The only takers are two eccentric Englishmen who want to embark for the other side of the globe.
English Passengers Read More »
The centrepiece of this book by Alasdair Gray (http://www.alasdairgray.co.uk/ and http://www.alasdairgray.co.uk/) is the text of ‘Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer’, said to be written and published at his own expense (in 1909) by Archibald McCandless. Belying its stolid title, this tells of a student doctor’s only friendship with the equally solitary
From its first publication in 1981, Lanark by Alasdair Gray (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alasdair_Gray and http://www.alasdairgray.co.uk/) was hailed as a masterpiece and it has come to be widely regarded as the most remarkable and influential Scottish novel of the second half of the twentieth century. A work of extraordinary imagination and wide-ranging concerns, its playful narrative conveys at its
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Lonesome George (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonesome_George) was the most famous reptile in the world. He is believed to have been the last surviving giant tortoise from the northernmost island of Pinta in the Galápagos archipelago. It had been thought that the last tortoise there was carried away by scientists in 1906. In the previous two centuries, passing sailors had
Contemporaries called Spinoza ‘Satan incarnate’ and ‘the most impious atheist who ever lived upon face of the earth’. But he is now revered as one of the greatest philosophers since Plato, as the political theorist who first enunciated the general principles for a secular democratic society, and in many ways a modern saint. Baruch, later
Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein Read More »
‘The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. . .’ So begins what is arguably Frank Raymond Leavis’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._R._Leavis and http://www.pro-europa.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=345:paul-dean-the-last-critic-the-importance-of-f-r-leavis-&catid=27:spirit&Itemid=61 and http://www.theguardian.com/books/1978/apr/18/classics.johnezard) most controversial book, The Great Tradition, an uncompromising critical and polemical survey of English fiction that was first published in 1948. He puts a powerful case for moral
The Great Tradition by F.R. Leavis Read More »
