Wine: a Global History, Kathleen Burk, Profile Books, £30 The World Atlas of Wine, ninth edition, Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson and Julia Harding, Mitchell Beazley, £60 One of the things that struck m...
Southwest of Tokyo lies the quaint city of Nara. As the capital of Imperial Japan from AD 710 to 784, Nara gained renown for its historic shrines and roaming deer, the latter of which crave being fed ...
What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity, Daron Acemoglu, Profile Books, £25 With a congressional election looming in November, Sarah Longwell, an American politica...
In 1692 Robert Molesworth was promptly relieved of his duties as William of Orange’s envoy to Denmark. Not for the first time, he had got into a quarrel with a Danish count, this time over the news of...
Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War, James M. Scott, W.W. Norton & Company, £32 ‘My God, what have we done?’ wrote Robert Lewis, the co-pilot of the B-29 Superfortress, E...
‘You see, we resisted’, the Finnish press officer who accompanied me on my first visit to Finland in 1977 told me, looking out over the Gulf of Finland, ‘they didn’t.’ The resistance she was referring...
Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors. It has been 50 years since I, Claudius, the BBC’s acclaimed adaptation of Robert Graves’ novels of Roman elite intrigue and excess, first...
‘It was with Coltrane’, wrote the English poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin, ‘that jazz started to be ugly on purpose.’ In the introduction to All What Jazz, a compilation of Larkin’s Daily Telegraph...
The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25 By my desk I keep a copy of Plate 51 of the 1920 Times Atlas. It covers ‘Asia Minor, Syria & Meso...
Pierre-Auguste Renoir hardly lacks admirers. His pictures sell for millions and his Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881) has become one of the defining images of Impressionism. Another vote of confide...
The annual opera festival at the Arena di Verona – an ancient Roman amphitheatre built around 30 AD to seat 30,000 spectators – is a sight to behold. The world’s largest open-air opera venue, it gives...
Sweden’s election last Sunday turned out to be much more of a nail-biting affair than most had expected. While opinion polls showed a substantial lead for the opposition parties (consisting of the Soc...
On the Equality of All Things: Physics and Philosophy, Carlo Rovelli, Allen Lane, £20 85 Seconds to Midnight: A Physicist’s Argument Against Rearmament, Carlo Rovelli, Allen Lane, £9.99 Carlo Rovelli ...
Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors. The latest series of Fauda is driven by the theme of tha’r, the Arabic for ‘blood revenge’ – here, revenge for 7 October. The cast and cr...
Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy, Ben Macintyre, Viking, £25. When Ben Macintyre was writing this book, he could not have foreseen that at the time of publication the...
In the conventional narrative about decarbonisation, net zero is going to be achieved by building lots of wind farms and installing lots of solar; batteries are going to fix the intermittency problems...
这是一则书评,评的是 Philip Freeman 在 Yale University Press 出版的《Aristotle: The First Teacher》(约 £18.99)。书评指出:关于亚里士多德生平的确切信息极少——他生于公元前384年色雷斯小镇斯塔吉拉,父亲尼各马可是马其顿宫廷御医,父母早逝,由监护人普洛克塞诺斯抚养,17岁被送往柏拉图学园并留了20年。 Freeman 的书节奏紧凑、篇幅短小,在这些"骨架事实"之外用谨慎的想象填充细节(例如想象他幼年可能常去的附近瀑布),整体是一篇温和、可读的书评,信息增量有限。