Notizie da 4 fonti
The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union. By Luuk van Middelaar. Translated by Liz Waters. Yale University Press; 352 pages; $40 and £25. Buy from Amazon.com , Amazon.co.uk The Lost Continent. By Gavin Hewitt. Hodder & Stoughton; 368 pages; £20. Buy from Amazon.co.uk THE euro crisis grinds on. But, because markets no longer fear the single currency’s immediate break-up, it has faded from the headlines. So this is a sensible moment to debate the direction of the European Union. And a good place to start is by analysing the political dynamic that shaped today’s EU—something that is very well done in Luuk van Middelaar’s book, which deservedly won the European book prize in 2012 and is now published for the first time in English.Mr Van Middelaar is a Dutch political philosopher who works for Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council. His thesis is that the EU is best understood as three concentric spheres. The inner one contains the Brussels institutions; the...
Off to do the hippy-hippy shake The VW Camper Van: A Biography. By Mike Harding. Aurum Press; 256 pages; £14.99. To be published in America in August; $24.95. Buy from Amazon.com , Amazon.co.uk WHEN a biographer of the Volkswagen camper van begins with the lyrics from a Fairport Convention song about the old bus—“In the south-west having fun/Gently cruising in the slow lane”—you can be fairly certain that he will soon declare the vehicle “iconic”. And sure enough, Mike Harding does.A broadcaster and comedian, Mr Harding was for a long time only a closet aficionado. Then he bought himself an orange VW camper and called it Molly. He introduces other van fans and recounts their road tales.The story of how this enduring vehicle came into being begins in a bombed-out German factory in a place now called Wolfsburg at the end of the second world war. It was here that the Beetle, championed by...
The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos. By Neil Turok. House of Anansi Press; 292 pages; C$19.95. Faber and Faber; £17.99. Buy from Amazon.com , Amazon.co.uk Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth. By Jim Baggott. Pegasus; 352 pages; $26.95. Constable; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.com , Amazon.co.uk Time Reborn: From the Crisis of Physics to the Future of the Universe. By Lee Smolin. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 319 pages; $28. Allen Lane; £20. Buy from Amazon.com , ...
Edmund Burke: The First Conservative. By Jesse Norman. Basic Books; 325 pages; $27.99. HarperPress; £20. Buy from Amazon.com , Amazon.co.uk THE first conservative was a Burke. In many ways this is true, says Jesse Norman, a Tory MP who has penned a succinct history of Edmund Burke’s life and thought. The 18th-century parliamentarian—who was a Whig, not a Tory—is something of a contradiction. A lover of English custom and institutions, he was Irish with an Irish accent. He was a philosopher who hated abstract philosophers, a champion of “the people” who decried democracy. He was inspired by the Protestant settlement of the previous century, yet was accused of papistry for much of his life.What fuelled his line of thought: his Irish past or English history? Perhaps both. The so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 was of fundamental importance for Burke. Before that 80 years of unrest had prevailed in England: a king was decapitated, a Puritanical regime took charge, London was in flames, Parliament almost blown up. Peace came, Burke thought, from the reinstitution of Parliament. After 1688, when a Dutchman dethroned an English...
Colour was their language “MUNICH was radiant,” wrote Thomas Mann, a Nobel prize-winning novelist, in 1902. “Art swayed the destinies of the town.” The German city, which rivalled Paris as a magnet for artists in the early 20th century, also swayed the destinies of the artists drawn there from as far away as Russia and America.In 1911 the boldest of them formed the Blue Rider ( Der Blaue Reiter ) group led by a Russian, Vasily Kandinsky, then aged 45, and the 31-year-old Franz Marc—its only Munich native. Among the others were Paul Klee, Alexei Jawlensky, August Macke and Gabriele Münter.Benin bronzes, children’s art and medieval embroideries were among the influences that shaped their vision, as did modernist music, Matisse and Picasso. The Blue Rider group was all about opening up boundaries. Though short-lived (it disbanded at the start of the first world war), the group would prove hugely influential in the decades that followed.This revolution can be seen at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, home to the largest and best Blue Rider collection in the world. The museum, which closed in 2009 while a new addition designed...
A friendly wave from Mr Sharif Avoiding Armageddon: America, India and Pakistan to the Brink and Back . By Bruce Riedel. Brookings Institution Press; 230 pages; $27.95 and £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com , Amazon.co.uk THE recent election of a new government in Pakistan led by Nawaz Sharif seems to bode well for an easing of tensions on the subcontinent. When Mr Sharif was last in office, in 1999, he achieved a breakthrough in relations with India. That, however, was soon followed by the most recent of the four wars the two countries have fought. Undaunted, he says again that he wants to make friends with India.Five years ago, the last time a new Pakistani government took over, it too promised a new era in relations. That came to naught when a terrorist onslaught on the city of Mumbai was carried out by Pakistanis with, the evidence suggests, the help of Pakistan’s spy service.In his 2009 book...
C.S. Lewis—A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. By Alister McGrath. Tyndale House; 431 pages; $24.99. Buy from Amazon.com , Amazon.co.uk IN HIS inaugural lecture as professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University, Clive Staples Lewis (Jack to his closest friends) referred to himself as a living “dinosaur”. Sixty years later Lewis seems more than ever like a figure from a distant age. Invariably dressed in tweed jacket, grey flannels and tie, even on holiday, he smoked a pipe and drank beer in pubs with his cronies, the “Inklings”. Lewis was an old-fashioned man of learning and lover of books, a classical scholar who never visited Rome. When he travelled to Greece in 1960, it was the first time he had left Britain since he fought in the trenches in the first world war.So why, half a century after he died (on the same day as John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley), are Lewis and his writings still of interest? This biography by Alister McGrath, a theologian at Kings College London, provides an answer.There were three Lewises. The first was the distinguished Oxford don and critic who seemed to have...
Money: The Unauthorised Biography. By Felix Martin. Bodley Head; 336 pages; £20. Buy from Amazon.co.uk ONE story in this surprisingly entertaining book on the nature of money is about the Irish banking crisis. The country’s bank system ground to a complete stop, with branches closed, the clearing system suspended and customers unable to withdraw or deposit money. As cash ran out, people had to find a way of paying their regular bills, or even just stumping up for a pint of stout in a pub. What actually happened was that businesses started accepting IOUs or cheques for everything, even though there was no telling when the cash would be forthcoming. It helped that a lot of Irish life is lived locally: builders, greengrocers, mechanics and barmen all turned out to be dab hands at personal credit profiling.In short, Ireland developed a new class of money. Its currency was not backed by any central bank, but based solely on informal if surprisingly accurate credit scoring. And the currency was transferable: if certain people said the...
The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire. By Neil Irwin. Penguin Press; 448 pages; $29.95. Headline; £25. Buy from Amazon.com , Amazon.co.uk YOU can tell a lot about central banking from its architecture. America’s Federal Reserve is square, squat and solid. The European Central Bank (ECB) is an imposing tower. The Bank of England looks like a fortress at street level, with no windows and thick walls. They are all powerful places, and private ones.The history of financial crises is a good way to uncover why these banks are so powerful. Neil Irwin, an American economist and columnist with the Washington Post , explains how central banks exist in part because of previous crises. Take the Federal Reserve. In 1907 America had no central bank. But a series of events, including an earthquake, a market scam and an investment bubble, led to a banking collapse that proved that America’s system was brittle and prone to failure. A bank to prop up all the others in times of stress was needed, and so the Fed came into being.Mr Irwin’s sweep is impressive. He uses anecdotes from the main historic...
The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia. By Andrei Lankov. Oxford University Press USA; 283 pages; $27.95 and £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com , Amazon.co.uk WESTERN politicians like to grandstand about North Korea, calling its leaders “mad”, “rogue” or “tinpot” ( The Economist has been known to do this too.) In fact, North Korea is the world’s most rational despotic regime: a highly successful Communist absolute monarchy. Kim Jong Il, son of the country’s Stalinist founder, Kim Il Sung, failed as a leader by any of the usual standards—he enforced North Korea’s isolation and presided over a famine that killed between 400,000 and 2m people. But he succeeded in what counts. He lived a long time, died peacefully in late 2011 and passed power on to his son. In the same way that betting once raged about how briefly Kim Jong Il would last after his father’s death in 1994, so...
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