AlbertoManguel, Chapter 2 of A History of Reading (New York; Viking, 1996). THE SILENT READERS In AD 383, almost half a century after Constantine theGreat, first emperor of the Christian world, was ba

On his last weekday in Prague Castle as the President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel taped a brief farewell address to the nation and then took a telephone call from George Bush. Havel, who came to office thirteen years ago wearing borrowed trousers that flapped high around his ankles, now wore…

JONATHAN LETHEM on being reviewed by James Wood.Pore Everything cc Lisa Jane Persky “The job of the regular daily, weekly, or even monthly critic resembles the work of the serious intermittent critic, who writes only when he is asked to or genuinely moved to, in limited ways and for only a limited…

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Records 28 January 2011 One of the strangest things about Richard Youngs is how acutely his records catch the world’s shifting hues and textures, how they snapshot moments in seasonal mutability: Atlas of Hearts seems a perfect encapsulation of that stretch of English weather from the exquisite…

 an Interview with Richard Doyle, author of Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants and the Evolution of the Noosphere Books that offer novel perspectives on psychedelic drugs and evolution are a rarity; and