Very often, well-known actors, sportspeople and artists are asked to opine on things well outside their ken. I’ve had it done to me in the past. I hope, for the most part, that I had the wit and wisdom to say, ‘well, I don’t know’, but sometimes, I didn’t. Okay, lawyers are opinionated bastards — [...]
“Book-love, I say again, lasts throughout life, it never flags or fails, but, like Beauty itself, is a joy forever.” (Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania) How can one judge how much one loves a book when one also loves the author? This question has been raised by the recent debacle in which an anonymous [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Academia, Books, England, History, Internet, Law, Media, Society
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Tagged Amazon, anonymous reviews, book reviews, history books, Orlando Figes, Rachel Polonsky, Stephanie Palmer
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Books with a heavy philosophical component don’t usually sell well, and publishers tend to avoid them for that reason, but when they do, they can sell very well indeed, and it can be very difficult to explain why. Over at Catallaxy, Sinclair has a thoughtful piece on Ayn Rand, whose books sell by the pallet load, [...]
January 21, 2010 – 8:36 pm
Via a friend, I came across this interesting piece on political correctness on US university campuses. The author starts out with a salutary tale: In 2007 a student working his way through college was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book in public. Some of his co-workers had been offended by the book’s [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Academia, Australian internet filter, Education, Free Speech, Human/Civil rights, Personal liberty, Politics, Society
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Tagged Free Speech, manners, political correctness, regulation, respect agenda, respect ambassadors, universities
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December 10, 2009 – 7:45 am
If this headline means nothing to you, it’s because you haven’t yet discovered this site, which is a thing of beauty, wonder and sunk costs. Yes, you read that right. It’s so amazing it represents sunk costs in advance, which is supposed to be impossible, but I know exactly what will happen to those of [...]
November 11, 2009 – 4:46 am
[Introduction by SL: Lorenzo is a blogger I admire; he writes quite a bit on Queer history, and also very wisely and thoughtfully on the 'method' of history and scholarship. His home blog is here. Now, I'm just a humble linguist and lawyer, but I've long suspected that a lot of historians have been led [...]
October 9, 2009 – 6:59 am
Now this is seriously cool, friends and neighbours. I tracked down this YouTube advertisement for Scott Westerfield’s forthcoming novel Leviathan via Perry Middlemiss’ literature blog Matilda. As friends of mine know, I’m a fan of steampunk — in part because I like its visual aesthetic — so it’s interesting to see someone marry steampunk with the biomechanoids [...]
Since everyone else has been doing Moon landing celebrations, I thought I’d accrete to myself the sort of celebration that makes most sense to someone who wasn’t even born (several years off, in point of fact, during the Apollo 11 mission). Unlike many X-ers and Y-ers, I’m not fazed by Boomers who wish to party [...]
As Legal Eagle, Deus Ex Macintosh and a couple of others know, I have three characters in this novel who are — to greater or lesser degrees — torturers. One of them also has an excellent sense of humour. I mean, the little shit’s actually outstandingly funny. I tried to change this early on in [...]
… And all of ‘em are in Homer. Well, that’s the story, anyway. Sometimes the magic number is eleven. Sometimes the magic number is three. Sometimes it’s something else. Sometimes Virgil gets a look-in, but usually Homer gets the blame for the sum total of basic plotlines in Western Literature. I used to think this [...]
