Ever since characters in Star Trek started to dash through the cosmos at many times the speed of light, people have wondered whether astronauts will ever do this in real life. The dream is that some 30,000 years hence, we shall be sufficiently advanced in technology to build among the countless stars of our Milky […]
Conor Niland (pronounced Nye-land) was Ireland’s most successful tennis player. In this recollection of the few highs and many lows of his professional life, in which he achieved (in 2010) a career-high ranking of 129 in the world, Niland tells it how it is for the ‘other 99 per cent’. The non-golden boys might be […]
In the first part of his magnum opus, The Anatomy of Melancholy, the 17th-century writer Robert Burton provides an elaborate table to help readers differentiate the various forms of the malady he describes. One, which he identifies as ‘hypochondriacal or windy melancholy’, is characterised by ‘wind, rumbling in the guts, belly-ake, heat in the bowels, […]
If you’re an early adopter of new technology, you may find yourself going to work in a car that drives itself while you use social media and other cloud-based services to help you refine a new proposal for an advertising campaign centred on a virtual character. Using these tools boosts your productivity and gives you […]
‘Surreal’ is a promiscuous word. It is used to describe the occurrence of things which are unusual or apparently impossible, it identifies that which is fantastic and seemingly irrational, it points to the uncanny or otherwise strange or dreamlike, and it is domesticated in off-the-wall fashion and furniture. Salvador Dalí’s moustache and René Magritte’s pipe […]
Once upon a time, two little girls grew up in Delft in the Netherlands. Both born in 1954, they were for a while ‘best’ friends. They drifted apart in their teens, met again as young women and finally came together with a bang when they both found they had breast cancer in their late forties. […]
A boy I knew as an adolescent, five years older than me and rather intimidating, looked like James Dean, loved Elvis and dressed as a Teddy Boy. I assumed it was some kind of virile self-identification. Growing up a bit of a sissy, I took against Dean, Presley and Teds. How surprised I was when […]
In 2008, Dr Paolo Macchiarini, a charismatic Swiss-Italian surgeon, began to perform daring transplants using synthetic tracheas made of plastic and seeded with the patients’ stem cells. It sounded like science fiction, but the results were compelling and were published widely in prestigious medical journals. Macchiarini was elected soon after to head a research team […]
On the morning of 28 January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded soon after launch, killing its seven-member crew, which included the world’s first ‘citizen astronaut’, schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Viewed live on television across America, the disaster was a national trauma that drew comparisons with the Kennedy assassination. A subsequent inquiry exposed a shocking catalogue […]
In 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 25-year-old Andriy Sodomora published his first translation, of Menander’s comedy Dyskolos. The Soviet Union imposed massive restrictions on the use of the Ukrainian language and Sodomora was uncertain whether to translate the ancient Greek work into Russian, the state language, or Ukrainian, his mother tongue. His […]
Today is the golden age of cricket writing. We have moved way beyond the biographies that came to fill libraries in the 20th century. The game is being explored and reinterpreted by writers using the techniques of professional historians. In South Africa, a school of new historians led by André Odendaal is applying the insights […]
Marilynne Robinson, whose acclaimed novels boldly explore the unfashionable subject of religious conviction, has now applied her judicious mind to Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament and the dramatic opener to the whole Bible. Genesis is supposedly the horse’s-mouth story of our origins, as told by God to Moses. Modern scholarship more mundanely […]
This is a brave book, fluently written, at times almost in a torrent, about what Rachel Spence dubs ‘Planet Art’. It gives a convincing account of the ‘global expansion which, over the last half century, and much accelerated since the turn of the millennium, has driven the strategies of museums, auction houses, private galleries and […]
For those who fancy studying there, choosing an Oxford college can seem a daunting task. On paper – and online – they all present themselves as essentially the same. Their prospectuses uniformly claim that candidates will find them friendly, inclusive, supportive. Inevitably, they have at least one image of a suitably varied mix of students walking past ivy-covered walls. There’s almost always
When I was a young music critic, the first piece of writing I got paid for concerned a compilation album devoted to what was billed as an underground genre of South African club music called gqom. It was loud, forceful and, above all, to Western ears new. As the Scottish producer Kode9 put it, this […]
Those writing in Literary Review and other journals work under the assumption that they may lift passages from the books under review to illustrate their points and give readers a flavour of the authors’ latest offerings. This, despite the forbidding notice on the book’s copyright page: ‘No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored […]
Johann Hari’s Magic Pill opens with the author, aged nineteen, attending a student drama festival in Scarborough, where he falls in with the entertaining, if heavy, Hannah. That evening they tour the seaside town’s fast-food outlets – shops selling fish and chips, kebabs and fried chicken. This marks the beginning of a close relationship, fuelled […]
It was in the barrio of Norte Grande, in the foothills of the Andes in northwest Argentina, that in 2018 a project was rolled out to try to predict who would become pregnant. Powerful machine learning, supported by one of the largest tech companies in the world, was deployed to identify the women most likely […]
The first question one usually thinks to ask an author is what drew them to their subject. But what book other than Drink Maps in Victorian Britain would we expect from a home-brewing, exam-certified beer judge and past president of the Boston Map Society? Kris Butler’s CV combines adjudicating ale competitions in the USA and […]
How much do you know about Indonesia? Measured by population, it is the fourth-largest country on earth. But it certainly isn’t the country with the fourth-highest profile. Its presidential election in February, in which 200 million people were eligible to vote, passed largely unnoticed in the West. One reflection of Indonesia’s low international profile is […]
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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