I received an email from Tom Hodgkinson the other day. ‘Dear Tom Hodgkinson’, it began, before going on to make a polite request that I didn’t write any more articles under the name ‘Tom Hodgkinson’, and signing off with the words, ‘Yours etc, Tom Hodgkinson’. I had just written a piece in The Guardian about a […]
ONE OF THE more unusual stories told by Tim Ecott in this well-researched history of van& is about how a young slave boy from the French island of Réunion, in the Indian ocean, became the first person to hand-fertilise a vanilla flower. In 1841, a wealthy planter was surprised to find two fruits growing on […]
MY HEART SANK when I saw the titillating subtitle of this book. I guessed at once that it was about the eighteenth-century heroine Isabel Godin des Odonnais, who survived a harrowing succession of disasters on the Amazon. Her extraordinary tale was a bestseller in its day, and it has often been retold.
AMONG THE POTENTIAL attractions of Gingerich’s study of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium and its readers is its alluring multinational band of leading characters. First there is Copernicus himself, a busy Polish canon, doctor and lawyer who took so long – more than thirty years – to get his idea of a sun-centred cosmos […]
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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