A History of Violence: From the End of the Middle Ages to the Present
Despite laws and mores forbidding aggression, the appetite for bloodshed lingers, finds Joanna Bourke
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Mughal Architecture and Gardens
This lavish and beautiful volume, illustrated with colour photographs by Amit Pasricha, surveys one of the world's most sumptuous groups of buildings and gardens erected under the aegis of an...
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The Virtues of Our Vices: A Modest Defense of Gossip, Rudeness, and Other Bad Habits
What do you get if you cross a philosophical look at jokes with a liberal thinker in favour of toleration? Answer: Emrys Westacott! Laugh? I almost did. That is until I got to the bit about posh...
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Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
Jonathan Fenby values a life of the man who began the People's Republic's economic metamorphosis
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Mary I: England's Catholic Queen
Balanced views of Mary I are rare. She is more often than not cast as the "Bloody Mary" of Protestant legend: reactionary, obsessive, persecuting - and, while we're on the subject, short and ugly as...
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Survivors: The Animals and Plants that Time Has Left Behind
Richard Fortey's new book, a delight like all its predecessors, considers what are commonly termed "living fossils", in other words, plants and animals that have shown very little change, often for...
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The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized
Rupert Gethin admires a philosopher's search to assimilate a Buddhist understanding of the world
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Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers
Our fathers quickly become synonymous with secrets. When we are very small, they go off to a mysterious place called "work" and often return when we are asleep. My father could not be spoken to until...
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Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe
Part of Jan-Werner Müller's interest in ideas concerns the question of where they come from. For instance, in referring to Francis Fukuyama's concept of the "end of history", he notes that "not for...
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A winning pair
Despite exhortations to academics to collaborate, jointly authored research still draws some suspicion. Co-authors Janet Beer and Avril Horner are adamant that, with the right chemistry, such efforts...
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Economical with the actualité
A year after the Browne Report's publication, Fred Inglis excoriates the application of a bankrupt neoliberal ideology to the academy, and calls for scholars to rise up and free the truth from the...
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Diary
LondonSigismund's Watch: A Tiny CatastropheAlthough Barbara Loftus' mother Hildegard fled to England from Nazi Germany in 1939, it was not until 1995 that she began to talk about her experiences and...
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The Pick - Notes and Letters
Notes and LettersLondonHow and what does music manage to communicate - and how far can the process be described in words? Does contemporary physics confirm ancient ideas about "the music of the...
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Our logo: shock announcement
In a "shock announcement", our Deputy Director of Logo Development, Roger Placement, has confirmed that Poppleton will abandon its current logo.At a hastily convened press conference in the atrium of...
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No creative spark in big bang funding
I doubt that I am the only reader who noted a particularly cruel juxtaposition in the 29 September issue of 糖心Vlog. On the one hand was John Martin's well-argued critique of the lack...