Times Literary Supplement (October 6, 2023): The new issue features War Stories – A review of the Iliad; Frances Sputford’s ‘Other America’; In Chaucer’s Shadow; The devil and ChatGPTand Martin Buber’s ‘I and Thou’…
Times Literary Supplement (September 29, 2023): The new issue features The First Folio at 400; how disease shaped global history; novels of queer experience; what Britain laughs at; literary thefts and coincidences – and much more…
How disease has shaped global history
Scientists often make poor historians. Their shortcomings in describing and analysing the past include a failure to shed the whiggish stories that academic history moved away from decades ago. Straight lines are still drawn between Great Men and the impact of their brilliant insights on our view of reality. They also sometimes fail to treat the material of history with the seriousness they bring to their own discipline. Simple questions that are drummed into schoolchildren are frequently ignored in analysing documentary evidence: who wrote this, why, and for whom? The result is context-lite narrative that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Works to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the First Folio
Next year, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC will reopen after a three-year closure for a large-scale renovation of its building, which dates from 1932. The centrepiece of the new Shakespeare Exhibition Hall, will be, as the press release puts it, something “that only the Folger could produce: all 82 copies of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare that were collected by Henry and Emily Folger”. The Folger holds slightly more than a third of all extant copies of the book and now eighty of them will be on permanent show in a “20-foot long visible vault”, while two more will be open in cases as part of an “interactive” visitor experience. Peering into the vault says much about the Folgers’ appetite for cornering the market in Folios but, since nearly all copies differ in some respects, it did make some kind of sense to buy many of them.
ICELAND REVIEW MAGAZINE (OCT/NOV 2023): The latest issue features ‘Island In The Making’ – A Scientific Expedition of Surtsey Island; Mycological Magic – Foraging with Iceland’s Mushroom Queen, and more…
Times Literary Supplement (September 22, 2023): The new issue features Playing with Fire – The limitless ambition of Elon Musk; Peter Brown in an antique land; The new New Journalism; A literary critic and murderer; John Gray’s Hobbes for liberals, and more…
ELON MUSK by Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson’s intimate account of a tech titan
When Elon Musk was a child, his parents warned him against playing with fire. His response was to take a box of matches behind a tree and start lighting them. Scenes like this are frequent in Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Musk, who has become the world’s richest person thanks to his disdain for authority, instinct for the dramatic and “reality-bending wilfulness” (and because he has applied these traits to good ideas). Isaacson reports that the family’s motto is “Live dangerously – carefully”, but a more apt one might be the maxim quoted by Musk’s cousin Peter: “Risk is a type of fuel”.
The intellectual life of a pioneering historian of Late Antiquity
By Mary Beard
JOURNEYS OF THE MIND – A Life in History by Peter Brown
In the late 1970s, the historian Peter Brown dumped his old dinner jacket on a park bench in Berkeley, California. It was not just a minor act of charity to the local homeless, who may or may not have welcomed a cast-off “tuxedo”. Brown had recently moved from an academic career in Oxford and London to a post in the United States, and he was signalling to himself a new start in what seemed to be a more democratic, less hidebound educational system: more jeans and trainers than black tie. He has been based in America ever since.
Times Literary Supplement (September 15, 2023): The new issue features what connects the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, the Tichborne Trial and life on a sugar plantation in Jamaica? In a New Yorker essay Zadie Smith spelt out the preoccupations of The Fraud, her novel set in the Victorian era, as “fake identities, fake news, fake relationships, fake histories”. Ainsworth, in Smith’s view, was a fraud as a historical novelist.
Ursula Parrott scandalized and titillated Hollywood in the 1930s
Salvador Allende reconsidered, fifty years after the military coup
Times Literary Supplement (September 8, 2023): The new issue features Modern conspiracy theories, China’s Platonic republic, Jonathan Raban’s last days, Sebastian Faulks’s Neanderthal, the English country house, and more….
Literary Review – September 2023: The new issue features Yoga Goes To Hollywood by Dominic Green; How England Lost France; Who’s Afraid of AI?; Don’t Mention Tiananmen; Anne Boleyn’s Ascent and Tastes of China….
RICHARD VINEN
Turning Points: Crisis and Change in Modern Britain, from 1945 to Truss By Steve Richards
In the good old days, dates were for foreigners. France, to take the obvious example, had repeatedly been turned upside down by war, revolution and changes of regime. But the English tourist in Paris rarely bothered to find out which of these distasteful events might be commemorated by, say, the rue du Quatre Septembre. The history of England (this was less true of Scotland and not at all true of Ireland) was a smooth and mostly benign progression. Educated people could tell you what the Glorious Revolution was but might be hazy about when exactly it had happened.
BLAKE SMITH
The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs By David Runciman
Artificial intelligence, it is commonly acknowledged, will pose one of the gravest challenges to humanity in the coming years. In the minds of some, it is already the most urgent problem we face. While there are a number of possible dangers that might bring about the extinction of our species, AI confronts us with a particularly dire situation, because it may well be that we have only a brief amount of time – perhaps a generation – in which to set up norms and constraints on the development of autonomous, non-human intelligences that may otherwise escape our control.
Boomers Daily 