I’ve been reading dozens and dozens of children’s books this year in preparation for writing my forthcoming history of children’s literature, The Haunted Wood.
I first read T H White’s masterpiece as a child, and returning to it I was blown away once again by its strangeness and its brilliance – and I found more in it than the child me could possibly have noticed.
A retelling of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur – telling how King Arthur got the Round Table and then lost it – it swerves between wild slapstick and deep poignancy, between jokes on the level of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, and passages of writing of stately beauty, sometimes paragraph by paragraph. It’s a mad, wonderful book, and there’s nothing remotely like it in the canon.
Voyager Classics - timeless masterworks of science fiction and fantasy.
A beautiful clothbound edition of The Once and Future King, White's masterful retelling of the Arthurian legend.
T.H. White's masterful retelling of the Arthurian legend is an abiding classic. Here all five volumes that make up the story are published together in a single volume, as White himself always wished.
Here is King Arthur and his shining Camelot, beasts who talk and men who fly; knights, wizardry and war. It is the book of all things lost and wonderful and sad; the masterpiece of fantasy by which all others are…
Watership Down is one of those novels that really shouldn’t work at all. It has what on first glance would look like a trivial or even a ridiculous premise – it’s about rabbits; some of them with psychic powers, for Pete’s sake – but it is done with such conviction, written so beautifully, and imagined so fully that it’s nothing short of majestic. There is real violence and peril in it, and there is sublime pathos too.
It tells about loyalty, leadership, ingenuity, courage, and trauma, and it persuades you to take its premise seriously so you too, shudder with fear along with its protagonists as you contemplate the prospect of crossing a few metres of open ground, or sneaking into a farmyard where their may be cats.
One of the best-loved children's classics of all time, this is the complete, original story of Watership Down.
Something terrible is about to happen to the warren - Fiver feels sure of it. And Fiver's sixth sense is never wrong, according to his brother Hazel. They had to leave immediately, and they had to persuade the other rabbits to join them.
And so begins a long and perilous journey of a small band of rabbits in search of a safe home. Fiver's vision finally leads them to Watership Down, but here they face their most difficult challenge of all .…
I find Carlo Rovelli’s explanations of the sort of brain-mangling physics that usually seems beyond us non-mathematicians completely compelling.
In Anaximander, Rovelli tells the story of his hero, a man who figured out in 600 BCE that the earth was a physical body somehow floating in space. But it’s really the story of *how* Anaximander thought, not what he thought: he invented the scientific method – accretive, patient and skeptical.
Rovelli’s discussion of what that has meant since Anaximander, and what it means now, is just thrilling; and rather than being dry and abstract it’s full of historical curiosities that I found myself interrupting my wife to share with her.
The bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics illuminates the nature of science by exploring the revolutionary ideas of one of its great forefathers: the Greek philosopher Anaximander
Over two millennia ago, a Greek philosopher had a number of wondrous insights that paved the way to cosmology, physics, geography, meteorology, and biology, setting in motion a new way of seeing the world. Anaximander's legacy includes the revolutionary idea that the earth floats in a void, that the world can be understood in natural rather than supernatural terms, that animals evolved, and that universal laws govern all phenomena. He introduced…
My book is an attempt to demystify the study of rhetoric – explaining how people have thought about the art of persuasion from Aristotle right up to the present day. I explain the classical teachings about oratory – which can still be recognised in every modern book on public speaking – and ground them in real-world examples from Martin Luther King to Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men. I think my happiest moment writing it was when I realised that Stan Cartman from South Park offers an outstanding lesson in epideictic oratory.
