Writing good trivia questions is harder than it looks. Some are insultingly simple: I once attended a pub quiz where the compere began with the question, ‘Did Adolf Hitler have a moustache?’, before sagely advising, ‘Don’t overthink it.’ Others are too obscure. There’s no point asking, ‘Who won the discus at the 1904 Olympic games?’ […]
The literature, art and architecture of Elizabeth I’s reign have been the subject of countless books. Yet the gardens of the period have attracted comparatively little attention. In large part, this is because gardens are organic and possibly the most ephemeral of art forms. In Gardens for Gloriana, Jane Whitaker sets herself the challenge of […]
As I edge towards my dotage, I notice that one of my several faculties in steady decline is my sense of direction. I am now the sort of sad person for whom getting around London represents a significant challenge. I emerge from the Tube station staring intently at the Google map on my phone and […]
Last year, visitors to the British Museum’s exhibition ‘Living With Gods’ were greeted by a strange figure carved from a mammoth’s tusk, 31cm tall and 40,000 years old. It had a human body and a lion’s head. The sculpture, discovered in Germany in 1939, had been worn smooth by prehistoric hands, suggesting that it was […]
According to this clear, readable and somewhat dispiriting book, the history of psychiatry is a chronicle of failure. Anne Harrington’s narrative pivots around ‘the biological revolution in psychiatry’ of the 1980s (the phrase is the subtitle of a famous book published in 1984), but it also goes back to the 19th century and forward to […]
Which is more unenterprising, art that imitates life or arts that imitate science? From impoverished departments in the humanities, we eye scientific colleagues across our campuses, envying the cost of their labs, the prices of their patents, the prestige of their prizes and the size of their grants. Their intellectual certainty is enviable, too: the […]
The Collector of Leftover Souls is a compilation of seventeen newspaper and magazine articles written by Eliane Brum, a Brazilian investigative journalist. It begins with a report about ‘baby catcher’ midwives in the Amazon rainforest and concludes with a moving description of a woman dying from cancer in São Paulo. These bookends are used to […]
For centuries, the Russian banya, or bathhouse, has been such a common feature of the social landscape that its very ubiquity has rendered it all but invisible. The chronicler of life in late imperial Russia Vladimir Giliarovsky noted that ‘no literature addressed the banya … it was all in front of everybody’s eyes and nobody […]
Yesterday I drove ten minutes from my apartment to a place that delights me: Sormiou, in southernmost Marseille. Not to the famously idyllic calanque (or cove) of that name, but to the hulking Leclerc hypermarket and its Ruscha-esque petrol station, which are surrounded by unremarkable recent low-rise buildings and a sylvan car park that is […]
This is quite a jolly academic book written by a linguist for the general reader about internet language. It has already had considerable success in America. The curious thing is that it’s a book at all. Hasn’t the internet killed off books? Why isn’t it a podcast or a live download or whatever? What is the language of the internet
There’s a question Alice Gorman must get asked at every party she attends, and after reading her book I’m still not entirely sure of the answer: what exactly does a ‘space archaeologist’ do? Let’s establish some boundaries. Gorman is not concerned with discovering if Stonehenge was a prehistoric observatory – that’s archaeoastronomy. Nor will you […]
We were having the bathroom done in our flat in Oslo and wouldn’t be able to live there for most of July and the first week of August, so when Sverre Mørkhagen asked if I would share the guiding duties at the annual Peer Gynt Festival in Rondane in the first week of August, it […]
When wildfires were raging in California recently, one of the priceless cultural treasures under threat, we learned, was the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. Among the artefacts in the library is a portrait of the late president done entirely in jelly beans: ten thousand of them, to be precise. Reagan was so fond […]
In 1830, Charles Babbage, the English mathematician and ‘father of the computer’, wrote his Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of Its Causes. He sketched out a typology of all the ways scientists could commit fraud: by hoaxing (where the idea is to reveal later that the scientific results were […]
The more absolute power is, the more it depends on projecting illusions. The thuggery that sustains any dictatorial regime goes to work out of sight; what the intimidated populace sees is parades and circuses, the appurtenances of totalitarian showbiz. During his time as president of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial […]
Since it was published in 1929, women readers have mused mightily on Virginia Woolf’s celebrated essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’. Why, Woolf asked, have women been idealised in the literary imagination and yet been denied the space and freedom, literal as well as metaphorical, to live out their own intellectual and creative enthusiasms? All […]
‘Iwas a child once myself,’ said Edith Nesbit, ‘and by some fortunate magic I remembered exactly how I used to feel and think about things.’ In recognition of the overwhelming importance of children in her subject’s life, Eleanor Fitzsimons devotes three chapters to Nesbit’s own childhood in a book that makes an excellent case for […]
This generous collection of 154 pieces of what Brian Boyd in the introduction calls Nabokov’s ‘public prose’ – mostly uncollected and sometimes also unpublished journalism – is presented chronologically. Where necessary, the pieces have been expertly translated from Russian
The ego-flood of memoir is very strange: I did, I was, I felt, I had, I wanted – I, I, I. But who is this loquacious ‘I’? The I of the present sees their past I in their mind’s eye. Bataille, who knew a lot about eyes and Is, proposed that we are ‘discontinuous beings’ […]
No one who was in Paris on 7 January 2015 will ever forget the fear and horror that coursed through the entire city that day. This was the date of the massacre at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, when, during an editorial meeting, twelve artists, editors and journalists were gunned down by […]
India's 'festival of democracy', or general election, begins next month. Like every good festival, it looks likely to have its fair share of murders and arrests.
@OwenBennettJon probes the state of democracy in India:
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Are iPhones ruining children's lives? A prominent American psychologist thinks so.
@tiffanyjenkins is not so sure:
Tiffany Jenkins - The Smartphone Pandemic
Tiffany Jenkins: The Smartphone Pandemic - The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an...
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India's 'festival of democracy', or general election, begins next month. Like every good festival, it looks likely to have its fair share of murders and arrests.
@OwenBennettJon probes the state of democracy in India:
Owen Bennett-Jones - New Delhi Confidential
Owen Bennett-Jones: New Delhi Confidential - The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India by Alpa Shah
literaryreview.co.uk
Where is the world's newest narcostate and why is it thriving?
@AdamBrookesWord investigates Asia's meth mecca.
Adam Brookes - Meth Comes to Myanmar
Adam Brookes: Meth Comes to Myanmar - Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Outwitted the CIA by Patrick Winn
literaryreview.co.uk