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Advance warning

Pauline McGovern makes a good point about vivas (“Harsh interrogation”, Letters, 2 May). Their main purpose is to establish that candidates understand their work and can explain it in the context of...

Rearing window

In his review of Peter Mandler’s Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War, Chris Knight characterises as “nonsense” Mead’s belief that the swaddling...

Ellen Gallagher: Freud meets his interlocutor on a black planet

Tate Modern exhibition AxMe shows African American artist talking back to race and gender history

Piled Higher and Deeper by Jorge Cham - 16 May 2013

Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939 by Thomas Doherty

Philip Kemp on how the American film industry reacted variously to the rise of fascism in Germany

Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty by Lucien Jaume, translated by Arthur Goldhammer

Biancamaria Fontana on the influences that shaped a French aristocrat’s ambiguous view of democracy from his studies of the American model

Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity by Daniel Stolzenberg

James Stevens Curl on a summary of Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies in the context of 17th-century scholarship on paganism and oriental languages

The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Snapshots from Deep Time by Lance Grande

Euan Clarkson is inspired by a detailed history and guide to the richest cluster of fossilised remains

German Europe by Ulrich Beck, translated by Rodney Livingstone

Roger Morgan on Germany’s economic domination of the European Union and the need for a sociological approach to redress the balance

On Love: A Philosophy for the Twenty-first Century by Luc Ferry, translated by Andrew Brown

Luc Ferry, the French political philosopher and minister of education under Jacques Chirac, here proclaims “the revolution of love” and “the re- enchantment of the world”. This is not a replay of the...

German Europe by Ulrich Beck, translated by Rodney Livingstone

Ulrich Beck, a sociologist, begins this book with Thomas Mann’s well-known injunction to a student audience in Hamburg in 1953 to strive for “not a German Europe, but a European Germany”. One measure...

Bones with plenty of meat

Euan Clarkson is inspired by a detailed history and guide to a rich cluster of fossilised remains

Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity by Daniel Stolzenberg

The German Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher (1601/2-80), was one of the most prolific authors of the Baroque period. His Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-54) and celebrated Museum of Antiquities (the justly...

Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty by Lucien Jaume, translated by Arthur Goldhammer

One of the most interesting features of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is the author’s ambivalent attitude to the political model he so greatly assisted in popularising, through his...

Fascism out of focus

Philip Kemp on how the US movie industry mostly ignored the rise of Fascism in Germany