What’s not to like about a Max Hastings book? He’s a reliable brand after all. Once every year or so a new one hits the bookstores, a meaty five hundred pages or more, piled high on the front tables, wrapped in an embossed cover and bearing such eye-catching testimonies as ‘masterly’ or ‘magnificent’ and with […]
James Klugmann was born in 1912 into a prosperous and liberal north London Jewish family. Precociously bright, he went on to read history at Cambridge in the 1930s, after which a successful academic career seemed to beckon. Instead, he committed himself to the Communist Party and spent the rest of his life working for it […]
Is there anything new to be learned about Guy Burgess, the naughtiest of the Cambridge spies recruited in the 1930s? There has been a shelfload of books about ‘The Magnificent Five’, as they were described, in a rare flash of KGB humour, after the release of the film The Magnificent Seven. As the most outgoing […]
My first year in the Foreign Office, in the days before email, was a deluge of papers: thin, white-coloured memos from other government departments, propelled across Whitehall through Victorian vacuum tubes; letters from MPs, engraved with a portcullis, demanding answers; stiff, pale-blue documents that had the scrawl of a minister across them, approving or rejecting […]
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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