Saros Cowasjee does us a service and binds together a compendium of stories about the jewel in the crown. Once there was a mad dream of Empire and it held millions in its thrall. A dream made real by the workings of millions of tiny men who bound together the threads of a common inhumanity [...]

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A war is a bit like setting an anthill on fire. The ants that can, flee but millions perish in the holocaust. The survivors troop home after the flames have been vanquished to pick up the remnants of their shattered lives. The Orange Trees of Baghdad is a superb examination of life during the Gulf [...]

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What would it take for you to leave everything behind and move away to another place? Let’s imagine you had a fixed routine, you did the same thing every day with invariant precision and then one day you had an encounter that changed your life for ever? Night Train to Lisbon is one of those [...]

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The Salterton Trilogy consists of three books: Tempest Tost, Leaven of Malice and A Mixture of Frailties. Robertson Davies has done us a service by examining the lives of people in small-town Canada with his elegant trilogy. In Tempest Tost we have the theatre production that has the sons of the town vying for the [...]

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Worth every bit of logorrheic verbiage.

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Here’s another entree from the NWOSCF menu, The Snowman by Jo Nesbo. This time, the protagonist is Harry Hole, a policeman from Oslo who’s tasked with finding the murderer of several women who’ve gone missing. The women are found in gruesome situations, usually dismembered or arranged in grotesque mockeries of life. Present at every scene [...]

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Every time I try to get away, I just get sucked back in. I pick random books and almost half of them turn out to be about ancient Greece. The Golden Mean is about Aristotle and how he became the tutor to Alexander the Great. I must have read hundreds of books on the son [...]

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When the event is as big as the sacking of Troy, perhaps it’s worth examining from many angles. You can read the classical Homeric opus. You can then read the tale from the point of all the big boys: Hector, Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon and maybe even Menelaus. But what about the women, since ostensibly the [...]

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How exactly was Iceland affected by the Cold War? If you didn’t know enough about the answer and wanted to learn more, Arnaldur Indridason’s The Draining Lake makes an excellent vehicle on the way to that particular nugget of knowledge. Firmly ensconced in the genre known as NWOSCF (New Wave of Scandinavian Crime Fiction), The [...]

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Here is a little excerpt from the works of Aldous Huxley. It is man’s intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. … Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. [...]

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