Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafa
A book by a Turkish author makes me think about national identity.
Last Night of the Proms 2023
I am one of those people who love the last night of the Proms, and I make a point of being in to watch it on the television. My personal favourite bit is the sea songs. But the whole event is usually great, and the standard of the music is often spectacular. And the waving […]
Station to Station by David Bowie
The first rock album I bought was Bowie’s Station to Station. It’s taken me nearly 50 years to appreciate it.
Byzantium by John Julius Norwich
A three volume history of the wars, politics and intrigues of the Byzantine Empire.
I Belong To The Brexit Generation
I was born in 1960 and so was 17 when Richard Hell and the Voidoids released ‘Blank Generation’. The title of this post is a play on the title of the song. It wasn’t a huge hit when it first came out and it hasn’t particularly stood the test of time, so I imagine you’d […]
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Lessons in Chemistry is a well-paced and light-hearted book which is well worth a read.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences by Eugene Wigner
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences is one of those pieces of writing whose title really sums up the whole thing – basically it does what it says on the tin. It started life as a lecture and was subsequently published in the mathematical literature in 1960. It is about something that […]