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We all know nowadays that human behaviour is a product of neurology. We all know that judgement and perception are the product of chaotic chemistry; that underpins the stereotypic Gen Z view of character and responsibility. But Rattray-Taylor was writing nearly 40 years before Gen Z walked the earth. Once you know that many common […]

This book should be compulsory reading in every school. Short and simple explanations of the most common errors we make when justifying our views. Once I had understood the distinction between analytic and empirical statements, I found it impossible to take most sociology and politics seriously. Understanding that many conventional statements have no meaning gives

This book entranced me when I was 11, and its imagery still remains with me. It was because Juster gave geography and geometry to a ideas and choices. I loved the way that character and plot were represented by a roadmap. I hardly even noticed the goody-goody moralising, just as no child ever paid much

To me, Twelfth Night was always about the geometry of happiness. The characters who drive the plot – the lovers, the normal people – are unhappy when they long for a distant object of desire, happy when they believe they are approaching it, and unfulfilled when they reach it. Only the weirdo losers, Feste the

The Dhammapada led me to this little book, which I read in Delhi – mostly in bed. That was 20 years ago. What I remember most clearly – and I can still visualise the words on the top right corner of the open book – was the explanation of dependent origination. It went like this,

Jung at his most readable. He says that we interpret what we perceive in terms of the primal archetypes which are programmed into our deep unconscious. For example, we carry eternal archetypes of masculinity and femininity engrained within us. Socialists disagree; they say that we interpret what we perceive in terms of social constructs and

Short and clear. An ancient Buddhist text aimed at ordinary folk. It won me over and gave me a new way of seeing. I read the Dhammapada by accident. I was stuck in a hotel in Hyderabad. I had nothing to do but, if I had the courage to cross a busy road, there was

This is the book I recommended to a friend who said that Buddhism was too complicated to understand. Wright starts with the concrete evidence that we choose how to interpret reality and that we can learn how to interpret it differently (which is, after all, the stock-in-trade of most motivational memes and self-help merchants). The