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Specifically dense
Michael Woodman is a lover of words. On his most recent album in particular, his lyrics display an affinity for extremely specific and little used terms such as petrichor, the scent raised by rain falling after a long spell of warm, dry conditions, and psithurism, the sound of rustling leaves. Psithurism is, in fact, the… Read more
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An orrery of thought
Having finished reading Neal Stephenson’s epic historical trilogy The Baroque Cycle it’s quite hard, on reflection, to recall everything that’s in it. It has to be one of the densest, most detailed, and most complex works of fiction I’ve ever read. It is also really a single novel, although each of its parts is extremely… Read more
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Judging hope
Martin Compston is best known for appearing in the entertainingly silly police fantasy Line of Duty, but his first acting role was in the grimly serious Ken Loach movie Sweet Sixteen in 2002. He was at the beginning of a career as a professional footballer, and auditioned for the lead part with no prior acting… Read more
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Keeping faith
Frank Herbert’s Dune has been a part of my life for many years—I started reading it for the first time just before I started secondary school. I re-read it several times, along with its sequels up to Chapterhouse Dune, after which I stopped trying to stay abreast of the series. I recall thinking that neither… Read more
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Putting medicine in its place
The historian Roy Porter was known during his lifetime as a ‘one-man book factory’, a prodigiously productive scholar who wrote or edited over 100 books—proper books, mind you, not light novels dashed off in a weekend, but major chunks of work based on original research. He took early retirement in his mid-50s, something most academics… Read more
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The last man who knew everything (about bread)
Mostly if I want to find out about something (I call it ‘research’ when I’m feeling self-important), I look on Wikipedia. If I need to go a bit deeper then I make a big stack of books on the subject and make notes on them. When I’m choosing books to pile up, I try to… Read more
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