Category Archive: Non-Fiction
The Problem of Knowledge
(by A.J. Ayer) Ayer is a blind alley, albeit a convincing one. Yet logic and semantics will take us only so far and reading him, one thinks, “you’re too clever by half…..too clever for our good.” We recently had a comment (by someone with the nom de plume “Butt Books”, has commented fit for posterity: “True – logic and semantics will take us only so far. The analytic tradition won’t venture into the realm of speculative metaphysics, obscurantism, and autofellatio. One must turn to the continental tradition for that.“
Continue Reading →Parting the Waters
(by Taylor Branch) This is the first of a trilogy re American civil rights politics under the stewardship of Martin Luther King Jnr, covering the years 1954 to 1963, ending with the march on Washington and the death of JFK. This giant work is bigger than a mere bio of King and its scholarship and sheer mass of detail is leavened with clear and eloquent prose and mature reflection. No panegyric, this: King is treated as a human, remarkable though he was, and as the politician he surely was. A wonderful work that demands to be read and read again….
Continue Reading →The Origins of the Inquisition
(by B Netanyahu) Definitive, immense and profound work on the causes and motives of the Spanish Inquisition. Inquisitiana [Note that TVC recommends the following: Torquemada himself would be impressed with Wakefield & Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (1991) and Lu Ann Homza’s The Spanish Inquisition 1478-1614; An Anthology of Sources (2006), which is a very valuable resource of primary documents. The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (1998) by Henry Kamen, is a good general volume (TVC has a pretty Folio edition). The Spanish Inquisition (1937) by Cecil Roth is a superior general academic treatment. The Inquisition of the Middle…
Continue Reading →Nikolaus Pevsner – The Life
(by Susie Harries) The rather ponderous biographical figure can make for a fascinating biography, when it is written and researched judiciously and with love. Pevsner’s love for his adopted England is shown in the Teutonic thoroughness with which he trundled about every shire in the country, travelling and lodging uncomfortably with a hard cheese sandwich wedged in his coat pocket, to document every church, every manor, every public building, bridge and stile of consequence. He accumulated a wall of architectural volumes for the intelligent layperson that still inspire the question: “Is it in Pevsner?”
Continue Reading →Michelangelo: His Epic Life
(by Martin Gayford) Straightfoward but intelligent and informed biography of the world’s greatest visual artist, well sourced and well imagined. Even when he ran out of puff, money or interest, he still managed to do great things; e.g. his incomplete (although officially deemed finished after 45 years of tinkering) tomb of Julius II, with its magnificent centrepiece of Moses. Ridiculously prolific even though he could be a right sod in negotiating and delivering his famous services, as multi-talented as his rival Leonardo, as contradictory as all men, Michelangelo is still “the one to beat”. “And who is He that sculptured…
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