Friends in High Places by Jeremy Paxman

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

Britain is a meritocracy in which the brightest and most hard working rise to occupy top positions irrespective of background, right? Wrong. Jeremy Paxman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Paxman) has no trouble in relieving you of that fantasy. Friends in High Places (originally published 1991) is a handy chapter-by-chapter guide to the main groupings – politicians, civil servants, academics, the great and the […]

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Queen of Scots

LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir, PAST PRESENT - What's new in History

Rosalind K. Marshall’s (http://www.debretts.com/people/biographies/browse/m/20165/Rosalind%20Kay+MARSHALL.aspx) Queen of Scots, first published in 1986, quickly established itself as a popular account of Mary, the most romantic and tragic of all Scotland’s monarchs. Her dramatic tale owes its immediacy and power to the fact that it is closely based throughout on the original sixteenth-century sources, and tells the story using, wherever

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Plague’s Progress

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Arno Karlen (May 7, 1937 – May 13, 2010, http://antiochcollege.org/news/obituaries/2453.html) was an American poet, psychoanalyst, and in particular, popular science writer. He won the 1996 Rhone-Poulenc Prize for science books with Plague’s Progress which deals with the relationship between Man and disease. Terrible diseases have wreaked havoc on human life since the dawn of history.

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The Oxford History of The French Revolution

PAST PRESENT - What's new in History

The successor to Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_Enlai), made a famous remark when asked what he considered to be the consequences of The French Revolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_Enlai). He replied – ‘It’s too early to say’. I think we can safely say that the consequences have been deep and widespread. There is a huge industry of historical

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Redcoats and Rebels

PAST PRESENT - What's new in History

The story of The American War of Independence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_war_of_independence) has usually been told in terms of a conflict between blundering British generals and their rigidly disciplined red-coated troops on the one side, and heroic American patriots in their homespun shirts and coonskin caps on the other. In this fresh, compelling narrative, Christopher Hibbert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hibbert and http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/27/obituary-christopher-hibbert-historian) portrays the

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Crowdie and Cream

SCOTTISH INTEREST

Finlay J MacDonald was born and brought up on Harris, in the Outer Hebrides. As a child he spoke only Gaelic while the village schoolteacher spoke only English. His account of pre-war life on Harris was later to be published, in English, in a trilogy of books: ‘Crowdie and Cream‘ (1982); ‘Crotal and White’ (1983); and ‘The Corncrake

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No Man is an Island by Thomas Merton

SPIRIT MATTERS - Reaching for the Divine

Trappist monk Thomas Merton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton) wrote more than 70 books on spirituality, social justice and quiet pacifism. In No Man is an Island, he provides meditations on the spiritual life in sixteen thoughtful essays, beginning with his classic treatise ‘Love Can Be Kept Only by Being Given Away.’ This sequel to Seeds of Contemplation (1949)

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In Defence of Wonder by Raymond Tallis

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

In Defence of Wonder is a set of  lively and provocative essays. Polymath Raymond Tallis (http://www.raymondtallis.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Tallis) exposes woolly thinking and pulls the rug from beneath a wide range of commentators whether scientist, theologian, philosopher, or pundit. He takes to task much of contemporary science and philosophy, arguing that they are guilty of taking us down every narrowing

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