I get a steady stream of offers of books to review, most of which I turn down.  I don’t have enough time to read the books I already have on my list without adding more to them.  But this one looked interesting.  It is Sibyls by Jorge Guillermo of whom I haven’t heard before.   I

I woke up this morning to the news that Tony Benn had died. I am in my mid-Fifties now and I suspect I will never again have the feeling of witnessing history I had one day in 1981 when I listened to the result of the deputy leadership election between Benn and Denis Healey. My

In its day the Club of Rome was a very influential book.  I was around in its day and bought a copy.  The woman I was later to marry bought a copy too, so for many years we had two copies.  It seemed particularly inappropriate given that one of its messages was that we are

I am working through the chapters of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire translating the majestic sweep of the original narrative into modern English. There are times when this gets tough, and this is one of them. Gibbon is a great writer and this is one of his greatest sections. I will do

  “Nobody listens to me round here.  I feel like a Leonard Cohen record.” – Neil, The Young Ones Faced with a time consuming and not particularly brain consuming task at my computer the other day, I threw out a request to my Twitter chums.  I’d listen to the first album somebody suggested.  The suggestion

Before describing the sack of the city Gibbon treats us to a portrait of the city that is about to be destroyed. Surviving documents enabled Gibbon to paint a very full and revealing picture of just what Rome was like in the reign of Theodosius, just before the final collapse of the western empire. We