What do you do if your son, who has grown up with privileges you have enabled, behaves in a way that threatens not only his own wellbeing but also that of your family? This question lurks behind Frederic Spotts’s febrile, compulsive account of the career of Thomas Mann’s talented, wayward and depressive eldest son, Klaus, […]
Somewhere deeply embedded within the manuscript collections of a Florentine library may lie a chapter Niccolo Machiavelli forgot to include in The Prince, headed ‘On the Utility of Bastards’
There are three Benjamin Franklins: the American, the British and the French. The first and the last are famous, the second forgotten. The American Franklin is a curious hybrid, conceived in the image of the American Revolution: the Founding Father as common man. The folksy tinkerer builds the American Enlightenment in his shed; the conductor […]
The former editor of the Times Literary Supplement Alan Pryce-Jones (1908–2000) makes several fleeting appearances in Anthony Powell’s journals from the mid-1980s – zestful, wordly and apparently modelling himself on Dorian Gray. Meeting him in June 1982, Powell thought the sprightly pensioner ‘at most perhaps in his late fifties, hair slightly grey, immensely spruce, full […]
‘This event of his life – his resort to opium – absorbed all the rest. There is little more to tell in the way of incident. His existence was thenceforth a series of dreams, undergone in different places.’ So the Daily News accounted for Thomas De Quincey, author and opium-eater, on his death in December 1859. Scanty ground for a biography, one might think. Yet De Quincey’s opium habit was a story that absorbed many readers at the time. Taken as a ‘blue pill’ or in alcohol as laudanum, opium was an effective panacea that hooked William Wilberforce and Dorothy Wordsworth, Sara Coleridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Dickens and
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm