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Meta
Category Archives: Literature
Who could resist this book?
Apparently written by an Orthodox Jewish mathematician, who has also written on game theory in Pentateuch. If Pascal had had these mathematical tools, might he have bet differently? Superior Beings: If They Exist, How Would We Know? Game-Theoretic Implications of … Continue reading Continue reading
Posted in God, Literature, Science without worms
1 Comment
There is no God
Quick chart from the Wall Street Journal showing that Richard Dawkins has sold half a million hardback copies of The God Delusion, and Hitchens may have made a million dollars from selling 300,000 copies of his book. Poor old Dennett … Continue reading Continue reading
Posted in God, Literature
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Vain echoes, desisting.
I have devoured Zachary Leader’s biography of Kingsley Amis, whom I hugely admire, and I wish in some ways that the book had been twice as long. But any life of Amis must have elements of a temperance tract, and … Continue reading Continue reading
Posted in Literature
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Sick and dizzy
The book has gone off, as a pdf, to Granta today. The choice of format is because I know they are people to whom scribbling on paper comes more naturally than annotating; I don’t want to spend more time faffing … Continue reading Continue reading
Posted in Literature
1 Comment
David Hume on Edwards I and II
Item Edward I’s firm line on multiculturalism: The king, sensible that nothing kept alive the ideas of military valour and of ancient glory so much as the traditional poetry of the people, which, assisted by the power of music and … Continue reading Continue reading
Posted in Literature
1 Comment
Mike Ford, a review never published
I did actually review his most recent book1 for the Guardian. They never printed the review, because the book,sent me by PNH, was never published here. But I did send it to him, and got a kind note back.2 Below … Continue reading Continue reading
Posted in Literature
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A friend you should have had (a note to Rupert)
Did you ever come across Mike Ford, memorialised at Making Light these last few days? He wrote the lovely sonnet in our living room. But go and read the linked posts anyway. They make a fence now, between us and … Continue reading Continue reading
Posted in Literature
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More prescience from JSM
John Suart Mills’s depressive breakdown is most movingly described by his autobiography: what makes it fascinating is that it was a crisis of ideas as well as of emotions and desires. Some of them — such as the one I … Continue reading Continue reading
Posted in Literature
1 Comment
Stick a pitchfork in Heaney; he’s done.
You may have harboured doubts about the poetry of Seamus Heaney; but you will not have put them so well, nor so cruelly, as A.N. Wilson in the Telegraph today. His review of District and Circle concludes: There is nothing … Continue reading Continue reading
Posted in Literature
1 Comment
A tale of the intelligentsia
via Languagehat, a glorious story: Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian author, spent the two worst years of the Terror, 1938-40, when Akhmatova was queing outside the prisons in Leningrad, working on a study of the German novel. It was accepted for … Continue reading Continue reading
Posted in Literature
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