The Mezzanine – Nicholson Baker

I first stumbled across Nicholson Baker probably 10 years ago, and I’ve cherished his work ever since. He’s a master pornographer (Vox), a reasonably successful polemicist (Checkpoint) and a tireless campaigner for the value of libraries (Double Fold – Libraries and the Assault on Paper), but he’s probably best known for his hyper-meticulous descriptive work, [...]

Everytown – A Journey into the English Mind – Julian Baggini

I’ve read Baggini’s work in a number of places: the Butterflies and Wheels blog, and Prospect magazine, to name two. In particular, an essay in Prospect criticising casual dismissal of English “folk politics” as knee-jerk and snobbish, raised the tantalising thesis that the politics of the Daily Mail, the Sun and the man down the [...]

F.R. Leavis’s response to C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures”

I’ve just acquired this slim volume from an Amazon reseller, and I’m a little saddened to see, from an ex libris sticker, that it came from the library of Prinknash Abbey. It even has some annotations in a beautiful neat monkish hand (not illuminated, unfortunately). The few monks I’ve ever spoken to have proven to [...]

On the Laziness of Children’s Story Writers

It is not compulsory for animals to have names that are alliterative with the creature’s species. Thus cows do not need to be called “Clarissa”, pigs do not need to be called “Peppa” and rabbits do not need to be called “Rachel”. A particularly warm section of hell is reserved for those who call hamsters [...]

The Road to Wigan Pier – George Orwell

George Orwell is in many ways the polar opposite of Michael Moore. Although both writers come from the left of the political spectrum (to the extent that that blunt measure means anything), Orwell is painfully, profoundly and scrupulously honest in his writing. The Road is a book of two parts. The first charts Orwell’s visit [...]

Alice in Sunderland – Bryan Talbot

Just finished Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot. It won’t set the world on fire, but it’s a beautifully produced treasure trove of fascinating trivia about the North East of England. I now have, thanks to the book, at least 25 different reasons to visit Sunderland and its environs. And for one thing, I need [...]

Two Cultures – CP Snow

There’s so much commentary on this lecture, I thought it was high time I read it – so I did. Granted, it started a storm of controversy which still rages to this day. But, frankly, it’s pretty dated polemic rooted in a 1930s mindset that was already pretty well rotted (apart from, possibly, around the [...]

Thomas Paine’s the Rights of Man – Christopher Hitchens

More splendid stuff from Hitchens. Dense, beautifully written, provocative in places and fascinating, this is an ideal companion to Hitchens’s book on Thomas Jefferson. Protestants -v- Catholics, the Spanish -v- the French, abolition of the slave trade, Normans -v- Saxons: it’s all in there, and more. Not to mention Washington -vs- Paine, and Paine -vs- [...]

Many Worlds Theory

Two questions: (1) If this is correct, what’s the theological (Catholic) stance? When the universe splits, presumably God, remaining outside the multiverse, doesn’t, but what happens to the souls of the populace? Can they split? (2) If two quantum events happen in the same planck time, does the universe split once or twice in that [...]

The Missionary Position – Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice – Christopher Hitchens

If you take as a workable definition of an evil person, someone who greatly increases the amount of human suffering in the world by means of deliberate and premeditated acts which can be empirically demonstrated to have that effect, then, on a reasonable application of that definition, Mother Teresa was evil. I’ve long held that [...]