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Sin, sleuth and survival
I first heard the name Marie Corelli in the 1950s, in my student days, as the favourite author of an elderly lady who hardly read anything. Nothing encouraged me to read her then, and it was only a month ago, 40 years later, that I saw her name again, when The Sorrows of Satan came up for review. In The Sorrows of Satan, which followed Barabbas in 1895, Corelli lashed out at all her enemies, real and imagined - majorly, the venal critics who were surely jealous of her fame, the prevailing prurient and godless European writers of the age, and the entire decadent society of late Victorian Britain; minorly, all sportswomen (\"giantesses\" she called them), book borrowing from public libraries (because it spread infection), predatory Jewish speculators, and the Italian countryside. Hack writer Geoffrey Tempest (the name suggests he has not attained spiritual serenity) inherits STG5 million and a sinister friend, Prince Lucio Rimanez, who has immeasurable wealth and power. The dimmest reader, even if he doesn't note the connection between `Lucio', `Lucifer' and `light' (obviously, false light), will nevertheless realise after a single page of thunder and lightning before the character enters that he is Satan himself, \"going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it\".
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Essential world atlas
\"This seventh edition ... highlights the best features of Oxford's atlas line in an affordable paperback format. Illuminating fundamental concepts in human geography, the 'Essential World Atlas' contains nearly one hundred pages of exceptionally crafted and easy-to-read maps covering the entire globe. In addition to maps of countries, continents, and oceans, dozens of metropolitan maps depict fascinatingly diverse modern urban spaces, with useful information for travelers about public transportation, city attractions, and more. Fully indexed, these maps reflect up-to-the-minute political and topographical changes with accuracy and clarity. Stunning satellite images leave a vivid impression of our world from above, while extensive supplementary materials, including world statistics tables and a completely revised section on 'The World in Focus' ensure that this edition remains essential\"--Page 4 of cover.
Book
Jolly good reference on birds and beasts
One, there is an excerpt from a critique by Nature magazine - the sort of blurb one finds on glitzy new novels. \"A fine compendium of unquestionable use ... make sure you have an Allaby handy.\" (Seems to me that no other publication has reviewed this dictionary or has made appropriate comments, as the same singular quote was used on both back and front covers.) I was still not impressed nor interested. The second feature of the front cover is more intriguing. It's a full- colour, close-up photograph of a Long Eared Owl. As a hardcore bird-lover, my curiousity was piqued. Turning to owls, I was perplexed to read: \"1 see Strigidae; and Strigiformes. 2 barn owls, bay owls, see Tytonidae\". Getting a little impatient, I turned to Strigidae. There was a 20-line description of \"A family of small to large owls\". (What other kinds are there, anyway?) Dissatisfied, I moved to the very next entry, Strigiformes. Here I was told that this referred to \"Owls; Class*Aves\" followed by a description that ended with \"There are two families, *Strigidae and *Tytonidae, found worldwide\". (Silly me! And I thought we were playing charades when the game was actually merry-go- round. Maybe I'll have better luck with the T-word.)
Newspaper Article
Shakespeare's First Folio : four centuries of an iconic book
This is a biography of a book: the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays printed in 1623 and known as the First Folio. It begins with the story of its first purchaser in London in December 1623, and goes on to explore the ways people have interacted with this iconic book over the four hundred years of its history. Throughout the stress is on what we can learn from individual copies now spread around the world about their eventful lives. From ink blots to pet paws, from annotations to wineglass rings, First Folios teem with evidence of its place in different contexts with different priorities. This study offers new ways to understand Shakespeare's reception and the history of the book. Unlike previous scholarly investigations of the First Folio, it is not concerned with the discussions of how the book came into being, the provenance of its texts, or the technicalities of its production. Instead, it reanimates, in narrative style, the histories of this book, paying close attention to the details of individual copies now located around the world - their bindings, marginalia, general condition, sales history, and location - to discuss five major themes: owning, reading, decoding, performing, and perfecting. This is a history of the book that consolidated Shakespeare's posthumous reputation: a reception history and a study of interactions between owners, readers, forgers, collectors, actors, scholars, booksellers, and the book through which we understand and recognize Shakespeare.
Book
Concise, cheap and current
IF you were an English-speaking musician, or a musicologist, or a mere music lover, and you had a lot of money on you, the reference work you would want to have on your shelf would of course be The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which an entry in this rather more modest volume very aptly describes as the \"largest and most far-ranging mus. dictionary pubd. in Eng\". Its 20 volumes equal those of the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and you can be almost sure of finding anything you can possibly want to know about western music in it, and quite a bit about other musical traditions to boot. This fourth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music is based on the extensive revision of the Oxford Dictionary of Music, also by Michael Kennedy, published in 1994, and incorporates several new entries as well as various additions and corrections. The Concise Oxford is not much smaller than its parent work, which also a one-volume affair; and apart from the omission of a number of entries and the abbreviation of the work-lists of some of the more obscure composers, practically all the information offered by the larger work has been retained in the concise version, sometimes in condensed form. New entries in the Oxford Dictionary which are also found in this concise edition include those on ensembles and artists such as the French early music gr2oup Les Arts Florissants, the young Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Moest, and the English composer and writer Michael Nyman, probably best known for his film score for The Piano. The new entry on subtitles describes a phenomenon that has become familiar to regulars at certain opera houses. Monoglots especially have come to appreciate the translations of opera libretti, projected onto a screen above the stage, which help them follow the action of a work sung in a language foreign to their ears.
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Philosophy in a nutshell
THE most significant feature of this reference work is its valiant attempt at comprehensiveness; in addition to an exhaustive range of entries covering terms and concepts from all areas of Western philosophy, there are also entries for terms and ideas which belong more properly to fields like psychology, literature, physics, theology and sociology, but which are of interest to philosophers. Not content with this vast scope, the author has also contrived to slip in entries on some of the more fundamental terms and concepts in East Asian, Indian, Islamic and Jewish philosophy as well as biographical entries on some major philosophers in these traditions. Just above the entry on aesthetics is one on aestheticism. The space occupied by that latter entry could well have been given over to a brief summary of developments in aesthetics after Kant. Someone who is really interested in looking up the term `aestheticism' would presumably be quite well-served by a dictionary of literary terms. One wonders if The Dictionary of Literary Terms published by Oxford University Press also has an entry on aesthetics.
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Now you can answer those curious questions
ARE you plagued by an intelligent and curious son or daughter? Has your pride in their lively mind been largely overtaken by increasing dread of the interrogative \"Mummy ...?\" heralding yet another question to which you probably won't know the answer? Well, help is at hand on at least two subjects. The Oxford Children's Pocket Book of Living Things and the Oxford Children's Pocket Book of Space are mini-encyclopaedias providing a huge amount of information about these topics in a brief and easily accessible form. For example: Did you know that the male emperor moth can smell a female about 11km away? That if you could find a big enough tub of water, Saturn would float in it because the planet's density is lower than that of water? That your brain receives about 35 litres of blood every hour, or about a mugful a minute? That about 3,000 tonnes of dusty material from space falls onto the Earth every day (no wonder I can't keep my home clean for long)?
Newspaper Article
A reference book faithful to its aims
THE scope of this reference work is clearly defined in the preface. It is concerned with politics not so much as a sphere of human activity as a subject of scholarly inquiry, and most of the entries in this substantial volume either explain concepts or describe and elucidate the functions and mechanisms of various institutions, or document the ideas of thinkers and politicians who figure in scholarly discourse about politics in Anglo- Saxon academic circles. The concepts and institutions which are fundamental to Western political thought and practice receive full and dispassionate treatment and, often, the writer adopts a minimalist approach towards his subject, taking different viewpoints into account and considering some of the key controversies surrounding it, before offering the broadest or least controversial interpretation as the best way of looking at the subject in question. An excellent article on the State takes a look at the historical evolution of this key concept in Western political thought before considering the various positions held by contemporary thinkers. This non- prescriptive approach and the focus on problems surrounding the understanding and application of various fundamental concepts in Western political thought is but a reflection of the inherently controversial nature of the subject, and almost all the entries in the Dictionary adopt this healthy, objective approach which gives the university student, at whom the book is specially aimed, not only a valuable reference tool, but also encourages him to approach the subject with the same level of objectivity.
Newspaper Article
Coming up short
MULTI-BILLIONAIRE J. Paul Getty's granddaughter, once married to Elizabeth Taylor's son, was for years a world-class devotee of mood-altering substances. If you could swallow it, smoke it, sniff it or inject it, it was her cup of tea. The other day, in an interview, she made note: \"Of all the mood-altering substances in the world, the most toxic is money.\" No such enlightening insights await the reader of The Oxford Book of Money, which is a compendium of remarks made about money by various writers - from ancient to modern. If you're going to call yourself The Oxford Book of Money, then you owe your readers more than 460 pages of comment by people who, by their natures, are probably the least qualified to talk about money - writers.
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