Category: Books
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A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
Currently reading this by Booker winner Julian Barnes, a collection of disperate tales that opens with the myth of Noah retold by a woodworm. Yup 🙂 It’s profound, and funny, and if you need a read for Christmas I’d recommend it highly.
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Mutiny | Withdrawal of Labour in the Age of Zero Hours
I’m no firebrand when it comes to trades union activity (though I am a lead rep in the education union I am a part of) but when a Tory government starts rattling sabres and threatening even more draconian legislation to outlaw strikes, it has me worried. Last night I finally got round to watching The…
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Getting High…in 1753 | The Gin Craze
‘In all history there’s never been a culture in the world that didn’t have some drug of some kind to lift people out of themselves.’ Poverty, war, terrifying religion and women experiencing liberation… Could so equally have written Getting High about the Gin craze era of the mid 1700s 🙂 In Our Time, brilliant, as…
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‘If You Don’t Like My Peaches, Don’t Shake My Tree’
Brilliant response from Shirley Jackson (who would have been 100 today) to a nasty letter from a reader. Love it 🙂 via @InterestingLit
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Can We Talk About Radical Theology and Alcohol?
In the past few posts about the bigger political, technological and cultural shifts that might be going on behind the ‘fake news’ scandal, I’ve proposed how Radical Theology might have in helping people to critique political and religious illusions. However, I’ve also mooted that Radical Theology could itself become a means by which the hard…
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Creating Freedom, by Raoul Martinez
This looks like a very worthwhile read. Comes highly recommended, and if you’re interested in understanding and acting in these strange times, sounds like one for the Christmas list. From the review in The Guardian: Creating Freedom is, in part, a mashup of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia, Thomas…