The pattern of European development since 1789 can be understood only by study of all those all-embracing forces that have affected the whole Continent, from the British Isles to the Balkans. David Thomson (Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge 1957-1970, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Thomson_(historian) first published this magisterial and acclaimed history in 1957. The book deals with all those grand […]
Europe Since Napoleon Read More »
Chris Harman (http://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/index.htm, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Harman) offers us this magisterial volume on the history of humans from the Stone Age to the present day. Originally published in 1999, Harman has had the heroic ambition to tackle the entire sweep of our past. Bombarded with daily news of international events as we are, it might be understandable that
A People’s History of the World Read More »
Irish novelist Maeve Binchy (http://www.maevebinchy.com/) was consistent throughout her writing career in delivering tales of warmth and humour, often set in small town Ireland. Shortly before she died in July 2012 she had just completed her final book A Week in Winter. The tale is set in Stoneybridge. The seaside location is full of holiday-makers
In the winter of 1417 the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini made a great discovery. In an abbey in Germany he came across a manuscript of a long-lost classical poem, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”). This event is vividly described by the renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Greenblatt) in The Swerve. The author sees
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Our very own Ian Rankin (http://www.ianrankin.net/) has at least 25 novels to his name and has a huge following for his Edinburgh policeman Detective Inspector John Rebus. If you’ve not taken the plunge so far into this most appealing of tartan noir (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartan_Noir) crime fiction, why not start with the 9th of the Rebus books – The Hanging Garden.
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Part of the ‘Little History’ series (http://www.littlehistory.org/) from Yale University Press this book takes on a very big subject: the glorious span of literature from Greek myth to graphic novels, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter. John Sutherland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sutherland_(author)) is perfectly suited to the task. He has researched, taught, and written on virtually every area of literature, and his infectious
A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland Read More »
Dutch writer and actor Herman Koch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Koch) offers us a dark suspense of a novel in The Dinner (first published in Dutch in 2009). The summary is as follows. It’s a summer evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery,
In 1974 Thomas Nagel (http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/object/thomasnagel and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel) published a highly influential philosophy paper entitled ‘What is it like to be a bat?‘ In it, he argues that materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of consciousness, namely that there is something that it feels like to be a particular conscious being. We are not constituted likes
The Higgs boson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson) is the particle that more than six thousand scientists have been looking for using the Large Hadron Collider (http://www.lhc.ac.uk/), the world’s largest energy particle accelerator, which lies in a tunnel 17 miles in circumference, as deep as 575 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It took ten years to build and this
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