This is the history of an idea that was once revolutionary and that continues to shape the modern world.
Category: Review
Faster Higher Stronger
Endure: Mind, Body and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson (Harper Collins 2018/2020) The four minute mile, the two hour marathon. These iconic times are two of the most famous mythical barriers in athletic performance. But are the limits that constrain what a human can do primarily physical, or are they… Continue reading Faster Higher Stronger
Charged with meaning
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. Ezra Pound (How To Read, 1931) The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams (Vintage 2020/2022) Who write’s the dictionary? Who decides which words are included and which excluded? Whose language is it, anyway? This wonderful novel is anchored in the real… Continue reading Charged with meaning
Stories tumbled by the tides of time
Philip Hoare’s digressions and tangents balloon into sea monsters, bigger than the narrative boat we thought he was steering.
Lost & Found
Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way by Michael Bond (Picador, 2020) We are wanderers. Twentieth Century GPS worshippers with hunter-gatherer brains. Neuroscience has identified specialised brain regions adapted for specific navigation skills. There are boundary cells, grid cells, head direction cells. How they are coordinated is the focus… Continue reading Lost & Found
So what do you know?
Or rather, what can we know? Donald Rumsfeld is wrongly mocked for a “misunderstimated” quote when he served under President George Dubbya Bush. There may have been many things in his political career for which he deserved ridicule, but not for this: as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we… Continue reading So what do you know?
Listening Differently
Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music by Amit Chaudhuri (Fabar & Faber, 2021) Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, academic, singer and composer who has woven an extraordinary and intimate book. Through the warp of his memoir of discovery of North Indian classical music and lifelong study of singing in this tradition (for which… Continue reading Listening Differently
Thinking Differently
Thoughts in Mental Health Awareness Week 9-15 May 2022 Fear of the unknown When I was in my teens I was afraid. Unnerved by what and who I did not know, and unsettled by media’s reflex association between mental illness and violence (which still persists in the lazy tabloids). In my ignorance these feelings were… Continue reading Thinking Differently
At the Crossroads…
Crossroads: In search of moments that changed music by Mark Radcliffe (2019 Cannongate Books) The Crossroads: where Robert Johnson bargained his soul for the Devil’s music; where Tony Iommi guillotined his fingers and was inspired by the gypsy jazz guitar legend Django Reinhardt; where Kurt Cobain’s girlfriend’s deodorant inspire the grunge anthem of the 1990s.… Continue reading At the Crossroads…
Outside, looking in
The Lighted Window: Evening Walks Remembered By Peter Davidson (Bodleian Library Publishing; 2021) The homeward traveller sees a distant light in the gathering gloom; a stranger looks up to the bright unshuttered window; in a distant tower, the light from a sputtering candle betrays the scholar late at his books. That figure on the road,… Continue reading Outside, looking in