Mandasue Heller was born in Warrington, and became heavily involved in am-dram as a child, and appeared in many plays and pantomimes. She carried her love of the stage through to adulthood, when she toured the working men’s clubs with her country & western band, Missouri Sunshine. She joined Equity during that time, and regularly appeared in […]
James Wood’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wood_(critic)) call for a comedic moral seriousness in fiction is handsomely reviewed here http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/may/22/featuresreviews.guardianreview6 The depth and brilliance of Wood’s insights left me amazed, and I hope they will have the same effect on you. The Irresponsible Self was first published in 2004. 320 pages in Jonathan Cape ISBN 978-0224064507 James Wood
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In an age when relativism of judgement is hardly ever questioned it’s a rare experience to go back to a confident assertion that there is such a thing as literary taste, and that this can be cultivated. Arnold Bennett (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Bennett) offers a literary canon here. First published 1909. Does it match your expectations? 94 pages in Create
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What happens when we accept that everything we feel, think, and experience stems not from an immaterial soul but from electrical and chemical activity in our brains? That is the question at the heart of this 2013 book by Patricia Churchland (http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/pschurchland/index_hires.html), one of the pioneers of neurophilosophy. In a narrative detailing her own personal and
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European thought begins with the Greeks. Scientific and philosophic thinking,the pursuit of truth and the grasping of unchanging principles of life, is a historical development, an achievement; and, as Bruno Snell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Snell) writes in The Discovery of the Mind, nothing less than a revolution. The Greeks did not take mental resources already at their disposal and
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Nora Roberts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nora_Roberts) a.k.a. ‘J.D. Robb’ is a prolific writer by any standards. She has over 200 titles to her name(s). It is by the pseudonym that Roberts writes the series of futuristic science fiction police procedurals featuring NYPSD Detective Eve Dallas and her husband Roarke. There’s certainly a lot of death on Robb’s mind – this 2013 outing is
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A half-century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Auerbach) Mimesis (originally published 1946) still stands as a monumental achievement in literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. Auerbach’s aim was
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This is a fine introduction to the philosophy of a highly influential German thinker from the first part of last century – Max Scheler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Scheler) 205 pages in Bucknell University Press ISBN 978-0838752289 Max Scheler
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In the 1960s within academic theology a movement emerged called ‘The Death of God’ theology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_God_theology). Acknowledging the increasingly secular temper of the age, attempts were made to re-cast religious beliefs and theological notions in terms that could be accepted by secular minded people. The conviction was that religious belief and practice were not worthless
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