Comics: Avengers Versus Thanos
/Before the mad demi-titan Thanos arrives to menace movie theaters in 2015, he menaced the good guys in decades of comics - a new anthology collects some of the best of the bad guy
Read MoreStriking a balance in the Penny Press!
/It’s almost never a clean sweep in my weekly Penny Press – almost always, I’ve got to suffer through annoying garbage in order to enjoy the fine stuff (especially since I tend to read everything in every issue – sometimes on my first go-through I’ll skip around, but then the ol’ Irish Guilt kicks in [...]
Read MoreBook Review: After Rome
/When Roman troops left Britain forever, the locals were forced to fend for themselves - and in Morgan Llywelyn's latest historical novel, two cousins take two very different approaches to a world after Rome.
Read MoreCityside Countryside!
/Our book today is a delightful little oddity from 1980: Cityside Countryside, subtitled “A Journey to Two Places.” It’s a collection of columns by two talented journalists: Nathan Cobb, then a features writer for The Boston Globe, and John Cole, the co-founder and then-editor of the Maine Times, and the columns act in dialogue with [...]
Read MoreLight Thickens!
/Our book today is 1982′s mystery novel Light Thickens, the last book written by the great New Zealand mystery author Ngaio Marsh (by far the most deceptively cerebral of the four “Queens of Crime”) before she died in harness that same year at the ripe old age of 86 (ripe and hypothetical, since in the [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Britain Begins
/Long, long before Canute and the Confessor, England was a fascinating place - the great archaeologist Barry Cunliffe tells the tale!
Read MoreBook Review: Louis Agassiz
/He revolutionized modern science, and then modern science left him behind. Now a glowing new biography introduces him to a new generation.
Read MorePenguins on Parade: Charlemagne!
/Some Penguin Classics, as we’ve noted, represent the tip of an iceberg – which can sound strange when we’re talking about fairly ancient works whose physical survival was certainly no given thing, but which is certainly true when it comes to records dealing with the Frankish emperor Charles the Great, known to all subsequent times [...]
Read MoreA Sad PS in the Penny Press
/Well, I finally read “Requiem for a Dream,” Larissa MacFarquhar’s New Yorker piece on Aaron Swartz, and I needn’t have been as worried about it as I was – mainly because MacFarquhar is one hell of a good writer (who, I presume, had nothing to do with the ridiculous hyperbole of her piece’s title). It’s [...]
Read MoreBook Review: The Murder of Cleopatra
/When examining the death of Cleopatra, it's inevitable: sooner or later, you're going to have to deal with asp-holes
Read MoreGeographica: Baboons!
/A little (OK, a bit) frisson of horror at a picture in the latest National Geographic: the story is that gangs of baboons in the Cape Town area have grown progressively bolder and more organized at stealing stuff from humans – “Raiding baboons open doors, yank out windows, and remove roof tiles” says one researcher, [...]
Read MoreA Pair of Petty Outrages in the Penny Press!
/The Penny Press has been mostly behaving itself lately, which is an oddly mixed blessing. When I’m happily reading along, encountering one great piece after another while ensconced in my hole-in-the-wall lunch-time getaway, of course I’m intellectually satisfied (and once again mystified as to how other thinking readers somehow get along without such a steady [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Spartacus
/He escaped from slavery, fought Rome, and became an immortal name - but what can we really know about Spartacus?
Read MoreBook Review: The Praetorian Guard
/They guarded emperors, they served emperors, and occasionally they killed emperors - they were the Praetorian Guard
Read MoreBook Review: The Devil's Looking Glass
/In his latest adventure, Mark Chadbourn's swashbuckling Elizabethan adventurer Will Swyfte continues his battle against the supernatural forces of the Unseelie Court
Read MoreA Royal Controversy in the Penny Press!
/Even if I hadn’t seen Hilary Mantel’s now-infamous piece in the 21 February London Review of Books, I’d certainly have heard about it by now. I’ve written quite a bit on the Tudors, and I’ve written quite a bit on the Windsors, and I’ve written quite a bit on Mantel – even if I’d somehow [...]
Read MoreTroppo Sottile
/Venice has traded flinty commercial acumen and world-weary merchant princes for an ennui worthy of M. John Harrison's science fiction; her profession has now become the art of insubstantiality. For centuries authors have tried and failed to capture her. Steve Donoghue surveys the glorious wreckage.
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