The year I lived in Athens was among the happiest of my life. The history of the stones was familiar to all of us – or so I thought, until Bruce Clark’s enchantingly readable history revealed how little I knew and, perhaps more importantly, how little I knew of the ways it all fits together. […]
For much of her sixteen years in office as Germany’s chancellor, Angela Dorothea Merkel, née Kasner, has been ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, to quote Churchill’s famous dictum on the Soviet Union. Her meteoric rise defied all rational explanation. A woman from East Germany, a scientist with an inbuilt aversion to straddling the political stage and mounting the bully pulpit: how could she succeed in a country with
If newspapers are the first draft of history, higher journalism between hard covers is the second. In this absorbing book, the distinguished Dutch social commentator Geert Mak gives a report on the state of Europe during the first two decades of the new millennium. A sequel to his bestselling In Europe, which vividly assessed the […]
‘You’ll never understand what Albanian communism was like,’ begins one testimony in Margo Rejmer’s Mud Sweeter Than Honey. ‘Somewhere on the edge of Europe there was a North Korea, a bunker state, a fortress state … you can’t describe life in a country that was a prison.’ Albanians lived and died under communism for forty-six years. It was a period of prolonged human suffering, of which the outside world still knows little. Even in
For most of its history, Europe has been a particularly bellicose continent. Throughout much of that history, however, Europeans have also been concerned to the point of obsession with not merely how to limit the damage inflicted by war but also how to eliminate warfare altogether. This is the story Stella Ghervas has to tell […]
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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