It seems we are living in a post-truth age.  Politicians and the mainstream media fluently inhabit such a world. We are bereaved of truth, sculpted from social and political discourses, subject to the prison house that is language, and reality becomes an adjustable construct.   Sean Sheehan   The diverse […]

An intriguing and eye-catching subtitle – “When Amerindians Spoke Latin in sixteenth-century Mexico” – captures the appeal of a book that for its author, Serge Gruzinski, turns the alphabetic writing of the Spanish and Portuguese languages into the ‘real conquistadors that stormed the New World’.   Sean Sheehan   The […]

It is easy to find recipes online but having a laptop on the kitchen worktop while preparing foods and liquids is not a good idea and, besides, a physical cookbook provides focus and a stimulus that scrolling down a page on a screen often fails to deliver.   Sean Sheehan […]

John Hardman, author of “The French Revolution: a political history”, is a recognised authority on the French Revolution and his micro-level knowledge is impressive. For a background to the momentous French Revolution, Robert Darnton’s “The revolutionary temper: Paris, 1748-89” provides a necessary complement.   Sean Sheehan   Hardman is unbeatable […]

There is an aching need to soberly model the contemporary political world and Anton Jäger in “Hyperpolitics” makes a convincing case for his decipherment of the mayhem, at least as it affects political culture in the US and Europe.   Sean Sheehan   For most of the twentieth century one […]