Recent Reviews

13 May 2013 (413 words)

Twentieth-Century German Poetry (Michael Hofmann)
- a dual language anthology

7 May 2013 (225)

Inspector Imanishi Investigates (Seicho Matsumoto)
- a murder mystery in 1960 Japan

30 April 2013 (131)

The Pendragon Legend (Antal Szerb)
- a playful Gothic romp dominated by gentle irony

29 April 2013 (365)

Alice Springs (Eleanor Hogan)
- the other "middle Australia"

8 April 2013 (212)

A History of the English Language (Richard Hogg, David Denison)
- "pitched at senior undergraduates in the main"

1 April 2013 (837)

The Indonesian Language (James N Sneddon)
Its History and Role in Modern Society

26 March 2013 (444)

*Notebooks from New Guinea (Vojtech Novotny)
Fieldnotes of a Tropical Biologist

17 March 2013 (312)

A History of the Low Countries (Paul Arblaster)
- from Caesar to the modern Netherlands, Belgium + Luxembourg

4 March 2013 (364)

Memento Mori (Muriel Spark)
- a novel about the lives of seventy year olds

26 February 2013 (489)

Horse (J. Edward Chamberlin)
How the Horse has Changed Civilisations

20 February 2013 (519)

The Hidden Force (Louis Couperus)
- Dutch pragmatism encounters Javanese mysticism

7 February 2013 (326)

*German Grammar in Context (Carol Fehringer)
Analysis and Practice

23 January 2013 (530)

The Making of Byzantium, 600-1025 (Mark Whittow)
- as a Greek-speaking, orthodox empire

13 January 2013 (458)

The Ring of Words (Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, Edmund Weiner)
Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary

28 December 2012 (332)

The Forbidden Kingdom (Jan Jacob Slauerhoff)
- confusions of identity in 16th + 20th century Macao

12 December 2012 (366)

Postwar (Tony Judt)
A History of Europe Since 1945

26 November 2012 (351)

A House In Istria (Richard Swartz)
- obsessions talking past one another

12 November 2012 (1100)

Circles Disturbed (Apostolos Doxiadis, Barry Mazur)
The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative

5 November 2012 (642)

Sacred Speakers (Simeon D. Baumel)
Language and Culture among the Haredim in Israel

30 October 2012 (337)

*Alberta and Jacob (Cora Sandel)
- coming of age in a small town in northern Norway

24 October 2012 (430)

Mendelssohn is on the Roof (Jiri Weil)
- a blackly comic tragedy about the Holocaust in Prague

25 September 2012 (2003)

*The Nature of Computation (Christopher Moore, Stephan Mertens)
- L, P, NP, EXP, co, SPACE, TIME, BPP, BQP, ...

24 September 2012 (397)

The Possessed (Elif Batuman)
Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

19 September 2012 (198)

The Butcher's Wife (Li Ang)
- a young Chinese woman is driven to madness and murder

13 September 2012 (342)

Great German Short Stories of the Twentieth Century (M. Charlotte Wolf)
- early science fiction, Weimar, post-war, and contemporary

12 September 2012 (1094)

Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611-2011 (Gordon Campbell)
- from its precursors to the 21st Century

10 September 2012 (333)

German Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Nicholas Boyle)
- between the bourgeoisie and officialdom

29 August 2012 (421)

Serious Men (Manu Joseph)
- love and politics in an Indian research institute

27 August 2012 (684)

Introduction to Climate Modelling (Thomas Stocker)
- circulation dynamics and numerical methods

20 August 2012 (435)

The Man Who Walked through Walls (Marcel Aymé)
- surreal realist short stories from 1943 France

15 August 2012 (870)

What to Believe Now (David Coady)
Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues

6 August 2012 (570)

The Story of a Crime: the Martin Beck series (Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö)
- the classic Swedish police procedurals

21 July 2012 (379)

The Dragon Scroll (I.J. Parker)
- a murder mystery set in ancient Japan

17 July 2012 (1071)

Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air (David JC MacKay)
- the constraints on powering the United Kingdom

16 July 2012 (1132)

A Cooperative Species (Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis)
Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution

5 July 2012 (1085)

*Red Plenty (Francis Spufford)
Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream

30 June 2012 (1189)

*Traveller of the Century (Andrés Neuman)
- the great German novel, in Spanish?

22 June 2012 (372)

Parallel Text German Short Stories (Richard Newnham)
German Short Stories 1; German Short Stories 2; Short Stories in German

11 June 2012 (1321)

Graphs, Maps, Trees (Franco Moretti)
Abstract Models for Literary History

8 June 2012 (762)

*The Book in the Renaissance (Andrew Pettegree)
- in religion, politics, news, science, education, ...

2 June 2012 (277)

The Village (Ivan Bunin)
- a novel of rural life in 1905 Russia

21 May 2012 (793)

*The Karma of Words (William R. LaFleur)
Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan

Full chronological listing (long)