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. […]
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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
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‘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
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Why do Japanese businessmen wear Western style suits? Why are global financial markets run on Western European models? How have Western consumerist values come to dominate the world? How has English come to be the global language of science, technology, education, commerce, and just about everything else? British-born archaeologist, classicist and historian Ian Morris (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Morris_(historian) and
Why The West Rules ~ For Now by Ian Morris Read More »
In this thrilling journey into the mysteries of the cosmos, science author Michio Kaku (http://mkaku.org/home/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michio_Kaku) takes us on a dizzying ride to explore black holes and time machines, multidimensional space and parallel universes which might lie alongside our own. Kaku skillfully guides us through the latest innovations in string theory and its latest iteration, M-theory, which posits
There’s nothing like the spectacle of female villainy brought to justice to revive the old debate over whether women are by nature saintly or demonic. Unleashed by ghastly visions of the angel of the house clutching a knife or pistol, a swarm of Furies rises shrieking from our collective unconscious, along with a flock of
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