GLOBAL POWER

Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: A History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) (From the Preface: "This book braids two histories: a little and a grand one. The little history is local, tracing the career of the English East India Company's fortified settlement in Bengal from the eighteenth century. In the the nineteenth century, Fort William and the city of Calcutta that surrounds it became the capital of the British Empire in India. In the twentieth century, Calcutta also became a major place where nationalist modernity was fashioned and mass politics was organized. The conspiracies, ambitions, alliances, resistances, and confrontations that mark this local history of Fort William and its environs constitutes one strand within this book. The grand history, on the other hand, is about the global phenomenon of modern empire from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. This history, I claim, was fundamentally shaped by the unprecedented problems posed by the fact of modern Europeans states ruling over Asiatic and African peoples, shaping in turn the norms and practices of the modern state itself. Modern empire was not an aberrant supplement to the history of modernity but rather its constituent part. It will continue to thrive as long as the practices of the modern state-form remain unchanged, The continuing global history of the norms and practices of empire constitutes the second strand of the narrative." Id. at xi.).

SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM

Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything, introduced by Jon Canter, illustrated by Jonathan Burton (London: The Folio Society, 2014) ("The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what is more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on  people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to see, weren't expecting or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else's Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there." Id. at 36-37.).

IF ONE IS TALKING ALL THE TIME, WHEN DOES ONE HAVE TIME TO THINK?

Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, introduced by Adam Roberts, illustrated by Jonathan Burton (London: The Folio Society, 2011) ("It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in 'It's a nice day,' or 'You're very tall,' or 'So this is it, we're going to die.' His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably seized up. After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this--if human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working." Id. at 137.).

ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR. AND AMERICAN LIBERALISM

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., edited by Andrew Schlesinger & Stephen Schlesinger (New York: Random House, 2013) ("These letters from the inside of the movement provide a quasi history of American liberalism and its struggles through the crucial decades from 1945 to 2005, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush." Id. at xii. From a letter to Averell Harriman, 12/12/1949: "The presence of a college president indifferent to educational values or problems has, as you would well imagine, seriously demoralizing consequences for the total intellectual life of the university. It is most improbable that universities under such leadership, or lack of it, will become vital intellectual centers." Id. at 28, 28. From a letter to Ernest Daniels, 8/1/1988: "... Of course, democracy is a most unsatisfactory form of government. The argument for it, as Churchill famously pointed out, is that it is less unsatisfactory than all the other forms. Despite the ignorance and infirmities of a mass electorate, the democratic form contains more possibilities of intelligent self-correction than any other form--or so it seems to me. But I have never supposed democracy to be a self-executing process. 'Perhaps no form of government,' as Bryce said, 'needs greater leaders so much as democracy.' You may be interested in some of the reflections in 'Democracy and Leadership,' the last chapter in The Cycles of American History." "I doubt, by the way, that those whom you call the 'plebeians' really constitute 'democracy's ruling class.' Power in the American democracy resides elsewhere." Id. at 501, 501. Also, see George Packer, "A Historian in Camelot," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/22/2013.).

INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH?

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, introduced by Terry Jones, illustrated by Jonathan Burton (London: The Folio Society, 2010) (" 'My white mice have escaped!' she said. . . . It is possible that her remark would have commanded greater attention has it been generally realized that human beings were only the third most intelligent life form present on the planet Earth, instead of (as was generally thought by most independent observers) the second." Id. at 112-113.).

NOT EASY BEING A SAINT IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY

Nicola Griffith, Hild: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) ("She wandered away from Fursey, following the voice with the lopsided words, trying to make sense of them, and found herself in a ring of buyers watching an auction for a naked slave." Id. at 143.).

DINOSAURS SINGING

Neil Gaiman, Fortunately, The Milk, illustrated by Skottie Young (New York: Harper, 2013) ("There is nothing in the whole whole of creation as beautiful as dinosaurs singing in harmony." Id. at 101.).