The only thing wrong with Otto Saumarez Smith’s book is its title. Far from booming, at the start of the 1960s the towns and cities of the Midlands and the north of England, and their Welsh, Scottish and Irish counterparts, were dirty, despoiled monuments to a bygone age, from which the young and talented fled […]
The publication of a new book by Simon Jenkins is always an event, and one about London doubly so. No one knows more about modern London and few have written about the city so winningly. His Landlords to London (1975) is a classic, indispensable to anyone who wants to understand the mechanics of London’s development […]
According to An Economic History of the English Garden, between 1820 and the present day, 15,652 gardening books have been published in the UK alone. That’s not the most astonishing number in this book, but it does make you wonder whether there is really room for another one. Roderick Floud thinks so, and succeeds in […]
Was It Henry James who said that when good Americans die they go to Paris? [No-Ed.] Thomas Carlson-Reddig is an American and he has written a book entitled An Architects’s Paris. He is not good enough to go to Paris dead or alive. The publisher’s blurb is understandably written in the language of hyperbole, but […]
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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