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"Over the mountains I come," said Nunez, "out of the country beyond there-where men can see. From near Bogota, where there are a hundred thousands of people, and where the city passes out of sight."
One of the acknowledged masters of speculative fiction, H.G. Wells conducts in this short story a disconcerting thought experiment. What would become of a community if its members were somehow deprived of sight? How would society evolve in the absence...
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Serpents and reptiles reach the heights of mountains and rocks, while the most fiery of steeds can never climb there.
Baron d'Holbach's 1776 Essay on the Art of Crawling is a delicious satire on the sycophancy and self-abasement rife in the courts of Europe. A penetrating account of the workings of power that applies as much to today's courtiers as it did to those of the eighteenth century, it also makes a compelling case for the value of moral independence...
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More than any other technical design or social institution, the railway stands for modernity.
In this brilliant essay the historian Tony Judt describes the singular contribution made by railways to the development of our shared way of life. From the transformation of urban spaces to the reorganisation of our sense of time, it is impossible to imagine the world we live in without the social and economic changes wrought by rail travel: no other mode...
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The world's humour, in its best and greatest sense, is perhaps the highest product of our civilization.
Stephen Leacock writes a masterful account of how humour works-and of how it very often doesn't. As well as being remarkably insightful about the various ways in which a joke can fall flat, Humour as I See It is an exceptionally humane testimony from one of the English language's most gifted humourists.
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We are going to Rome to scatter these words of liberty far and wide, words which for seven years have been forbidden like a crime. And with reason, for if they had been allowed, they would have shaken the fascist tyranny to its foundations within a few hours.
In 1931 the Italian poet Lauro de Bosis flew over Rome in a small plane in order to scatter anti-Fascist pamphlets from the sky. He did not survive the journey, but in “Story of My Death”...
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I fully realize that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type. Nothing is further from my mind than to shake either your conviction or your distrust.
Walter Benjamin was one of the great cultural critics of the twentieth century. In “Unpacking My Library” he offers a strikingly personal meditation on his career as...
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No vices are so hard to eradicate as those which are popularly regarded as virtues. Among these the vice of reading is foremost.
A great American novelist offers a scathing attack on the worst kinds of reading. Edith Wharton argues that the growing cultural influence of "mechanical" readers is having a disastrous impact on the world of letters. A subtly devastating work of social criticism, “The Vice of Reading” is also a celebration of the voracious...
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I invent the most hopeless sounding plots; very often they are based on something I've read in a newspaper. And people say, 'Oh, this is all nonsense', and then the Russians come along in Germany and shoot people with potassium cyanide pistols.
Between them, Ian Fleming and Georges Simenon created two of the best-known heroes of modern fiction. In this illuminating dialogue, the authors who gave us James Bond and Jules Maigret discuss (among other...
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"It matters little where we pass the remnant of our days. They will not be many".
A powerful lament for an imperilled way of life, the 1854 speech traditionally attributed to Chief Seattle of the Duwamish Tribe is a vital document in the history of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Chief Seattle's oration was delivered in the face of the impending loss of his people's land to the State of Washington, and it remains a profound meditation on...
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"It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you".
James Baldwin was one of America's most powerful analysts of the psychology of white supremacy. In this speech, delivered in 1965 at the Cambridge Union Society, he offers a devastating, but also strikingly empathetic, account of the role played by racism...
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"I know the same day made me free, which was the last day for him who made the proverb true-One must be born either a Pharaoh or a fool".Best known as a philosopher and tragedian, in Apocolocyntosis Seneca also produced one of classical literature's greatest satires. Depicting a posthumous trial in which the recently deceased Emperor Claudius makes the case for his elevation to the company of the gods, this short work brilliantly skewers the pretensions...
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