Too Many People?

Posted on by Tom Fleming

It took until 1806 for the population of Earth to reach a billion people. In late 2011, the world population was seven billion. We’re on our way to ten billion by 2100. Fossil fuels drove the exponential surge, forcing us to extract still more in turn and taxing our environment to breaking point. What to […]

Book of Exile

Posted on by Tom Fleming

In a highly influential little book, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), the American historian Yosef Yerushalmi argued that history writing had all but disappeared from Jewish culture for well over a millennium following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70. This was a dramatic rupture within a culture steeped in […]

What the Celts Did For Us

Posted on by Tom Fleming

Graham Robb’s new book has a remarkable opening. Taken unawares in his quiet Oxfordshire cottage, he is visited not by a person from Porlock, but by something quite the reverse: an idea so urgent and striking that it upturns his life and inspires his work. So vivid, indeed, that he speculates, ‘it would not have […]

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