Category Archives: Literature

Archaeology, History, Journalism, Literature

The big idea: could the greatest works of literature be undiscovered?

WHEN the great library at Alexandria went up in flames, it is said that the books took six months to burn. We can’t know if this is true. Exactly how the library met its end, and whether it even existed, have been subjects of speculation for more than 2,000 years. For two millennia, we’ve been haunted by the idea that what has been passed down to us might not be representative of the vast corpus of literature and knowledge that humans have created. It’s a fear that has only been confirmed by new methods for estimating the extent of the losses…

This article first appeared in The Guardian on 28 May 2022. To continue reading, click here.

History, Journalism, Literature

The Covid novels are arriving

THE first coronavirus novel from a major British writer has just been published. Summer, the last book in Scottish writer Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, is infused with the pandemic we are living through. That it has appeared now is a tribute to the agility of both author and publisher, whose goal was to produce literature in as close to real time as possible. Does it herald a coming wave of pandemic fiction…?

This article first appeared in The Guardian on 7 August 2020. To continue reading, click here.

History, History of science or medicine, Journalism, Literature, Medicine

Beyond borders: the best books about pandemics

WITH cases of coronavirus reported on four continents, health experts are concerned it could become a pandemic. The world is currently in the grip of two others – Aids and tuberculosis – while measles is on the rise again and polio stubbornly resists eradication. When smallpox was wiped out, some in the medical community were so high on their success they thought other infectious diseases would soon be licked. Fifty years later, this triumph remains unique…

This article was first published in The Guardian on 6 February 2020. To continue reading, click here.

Journalism, Literature

To sing of one origin

Times_Literary_Supplement_logoNOBODY understood the power of boundaries better than Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (1878–1947). A Swiss writer who had to go to Paris to find his voice, he returned to his native canton of Vaud during the First World War to create a distinctively French-Swiss body of literature. He was loyal to his patrie but his patrie was not Switzerland. It was his village, at most his canton – the people who shared his language and who sprang from the same soil as him. From his home on the north shore of Lake Geneva he looked across the water at the French Alps, a reminder that boundaries are where both creation and destruction happen; where opposing forces clash and new forms are born out of the old…

This article first appeared in The Times Literary Supplement on 21 August 2015.