E. H. Gombrich’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._H._Gombrich) bestselling history of the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_History_of_the_World) for young readers tells the story of mankind from the Stone Age to the atomic bomb, focusing not on small detail but on the sweep of human experience, the extent of human achievement, and the depth of its frailty. The product of a generous and humane sensibility, […]
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Latvian-born Oxford historian Isaiah Berlin (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin) was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. He was an activist of the intellect who marshalled vast erudition and eloquence in defence of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political plurality. The essays in The Crooked Timber of Humanity expose the links between
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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
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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
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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
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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,
