After a TV programme on the horrors of nuclear war, a woman rang the BBC to ask whether fallout shelters could be fitted with cat-flaps. It is the kind of item that gets into This England (it did) as an example of our native dottiness. It could equally well have gone into The Bookseller as […]
I hate cats, I have no particularly strong feelings about pigs and I am vaguely fond of mice. Presumably these are the emotions I am supposed to have towards the Nazis, Poles and Jews from Art Spiegelman’s unsettling comic book of the holocaust Maus. In a pictorial biography of his father, Spiegelman sends us scurrying […]
I read this sublimely silly book while enduring the hideous experience of flying to New York on the quaintly-named ‘People’s Express’, an airline where they wait until you’ve fallen asleep to wake you up and make you pay for your ticker, have no hot food and charge you six dollars for a disgusting ‘picnic’ which […]
When Henry VIII’s dynastic and leg-over considerations led him to break with Rome, he can have had no idea what an odd institution he was creating in the Church of England, or how much anguish he was storing up for generations of sensitive young Englishmen. Three of the more anguished, the editor of the Spectator, […]
Roy Shaw was appointed Secretary-General of the Arts Council in 1975. He came from a working class background in the North of England, went to university late, found his career in adult education, became a Roman Catholic in the early fifties and saw the Arts Council as an extension of his wish ‘to help others […]
Sometimes it seems that the real division between people has nothing to do with talent, wealth or beauty. For some people, life’s hard, and for some it’s easy; there’s not much logic attached to the division, and one half of humanity certainly doesn’t understand the pleasures and pains of the other. In A Life of […]
When Daniel Farson became a television interviewer in 1956, the critics were inclined to accuse him of brutality: MR FARSON PULLS NO PUNCHES, as one newspaper headline put it mildly. In fact, the brutality is simply the appearance created by his honesty: a determination to tell the flat truth about any thing he discusses. This […]
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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