Any Questions?

Posted on by David Gelber

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?’ […]

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How Did Their Gardens Grow?

Posted on by David Gelber

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 […]

They Don’t Even Have Smartphones

Posted on by David Gelber

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 […]

Articles of Faith

Posted on by David Gelber

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 […]

All in the Brain?

Posted on by David Gelber

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 […]

Papa Franz’s People

Posted on by David Gelber

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 […]

Tales from a Land of Glass Eaters

Posted on by David Gelber

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 […]

Washing Away Their Sins

Posted on by David Gelber

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 […]

Babylon on Sea

Posted on by David Gelber

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 […]

WTF is Grammar?

Posted on by David Gelber

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

Not Rocket Science

Posted on by David Gelber

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 […]

It’s a Knockoff

Posted on by David Gelber

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 […]

Lies, Damned Lies & Research Findings

Posted on by David Gelber

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 […]

Dead Men’s Shoes

Posted on by David Gelber

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 […]

A Postcode of One’s Own

Posted on by David Gelber

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 […]

Five Children and Nesbit

Posted on by David Gelber

‘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 […]

The All-Seeing I

Posted on by Tom Fleming

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’ […]

Massacre of the Satirists

Posted on by Tom Fleming

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 […]

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