Author Archives: John Sloan

Kehlmann, Daniel. Tyll. Pantheon, New York, 2020. F; 3/20. This ironic picaresque features a 17th-century clown or troubadour and manages to be playful and deadly serious at the same time. Tyll Ulenspiegel cavorts around central Europe during the Thirty Years’ … Continue reading →

Kimball, Roger. The Fortunes of Permanence. St. Augustine’s, South Bend Indiana. 2012. NF;2/20. when everybody’s somebody, nobody’s anybody – W S Gilbert, The Gondoliers I discovered Roger Kimball – who is definitely of the opinion that being “somebody” (and that … Continue reading →

Deneen, Patrick. Why Liberalism Failed. Yale, New Haven, 2018. NF;1/20 The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference in age, character, … Continue reading →

Gopnik, Adam. A Thousand Small Sanities. Basic Books, New York, 2019. NF;1/20. I decided, ignoring inner “this is naïvely silly” warnings, to look at some current thinking about the tiresome growing polarity that won’t go away: the Left and the … Continue reading →

Oreskes, Naomi et al. Why Trust Science? Princeton, 2019. NF;12/19. This assembly of authoritative essays tackles a monster issue that has been simmering in science academics’ and science philosophers’ esoteric conversations for decades. In the past several years the question … Continue reading →

Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2001. NF; 12/19. I went looking for more by Menand after being impressed with his precision and humour in a couple of New Yorker articles, and so dove into … Continue reading →

December 2019. In town for a sad family funeral, we needed to (and successfully did) drown our sorrows in a really high-class brunch before getting back on the plane. This place delivers. We wish it were closer to home. It’s … Continue reading →