An unexpected and enviable problem has emerged in the US: the existence of an excess of quality television series sometimes known as ‘peak TV’. The year 2015 beat the previous record with the transmission of more than four hundred titles. It is no wonder, then, that the special issue of Entertainment Weekly dated 18 September of that year, which provides a preview of t…
To be an airline passenger in transit is to move through states without permanently adopting them. The very legal nature of a transit lounge embodies this perfectly. When one is in tran-sit, one does not pass through immigration and enter the legal boundaries of a nation-state. The strange nature of transit is best exemplified by its failures — the case of Mehran Karimi Nas…
Technical politics is the name for disputes over technology design involving social actors with different values, interests and ideas about the future shape of society. Such disputes are surely as old as technology itself but in the modern, industrial period they tended to involve quite narrow sections of society, and the resultant technology served very spe-cifi…
This book deals with the legacy of Norway’s garden cities. It tracks the origins of the Norwegian garden city movement and discusses the current status of built examples. Through a detailed study of one example, Sinsen Garden City in Oslo, the book links the garden city heritage to a number of ongoing scholarly debates on topics like densification, sustainability, socio-economic conditions, l…
his exhibition at the historic Victoria Gallery and Museum, Liverpool, comprises almost entirely of art works in the collection of Theresa Roberts, who is founder and owner of the Jamaica Patty Co. restaurant, based in Covent Garden, London.Theresa Roberts was born in Jamaica to parents who emigrated to the United Kingdom as part of the ‘Windrush Generation’: those who were invited by Briti…
Assynt is well known for its complex geology and was the field laboratory of 19th-century geologists Benjamin Peach and John Horne, who pioneered geological mapping techniques and the modern understanding of processes of geological thrust, opening up new possibilities in the study of landscape formation and evolution. Some of the world’s oldest rocks are found in Assynt, gneis…
A Literary History of Medicine by the Syrian physician Ibn Ab? U?aybi?ah (d. 1270) is the earliest comprehensive history of medicine. It contains biographies of over 432 physicians, ranging from the ancient Greeks to the author’s contemporaries, describing their training and practice, often as court physicians, and listing their medical works; all this interlaced with poems and anecdotes. The…
No city in the world is better covered by literature – fictional and non-fictional – than London. From Pepys, via Dickens, to Ackroyd, London has benefited from a series of talented historians, novelists and commentators who have provided detailed accounts of the city’s condition. In the past few years a new tranche of books has been published on the contemporary character of the…
owever, in their eagerness to have these volumes read and stud-ied, Dunn and Morris miss how formative the short story is to such books, so much so that Rolf Lundén argues for short story com-posite. His study rightly attends to the tensions between unity and fragmentation that distinguish the genre, and he argues that not every such volume features cyclicality …