In the 1720s, when Daniel Defoe, in his A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, came to the ‘unpassable hills’ of Westmorland, he concluded that ‘all the pleasant part of England was at an end’. To him and his contemporaries mountains were ‘horrid’, being uncultivable, cold and likely to drop rocks on you. […]
Old Labour took pride in its history and the legends surrounding ‘This Great Movement of Ours’. In its heartlands, generations treasured what the French call lieux de mémoire, their sites of memory. It was an often sentimental tradition – heroes like Hardie, Lansbury or Bevan, crises like Taff Vale or Tonypandy, triumphs like 1945, occasional […]
In 1948, W H Auden wrote of Britain as: A backward And dilapidated province, connected To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain Seedy appeal Such a perspective seemed even more appropriate in the 1970s, and in 1974 the Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan, confessed that ‘sometimes when I go to bed at […]
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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