Hollinghurst’s new novel simultaneously contains some of his most autobiographical writing and a premise utterly removed from his own life. Written in the first-person, it opens with a young boy, David Win, living on the north Berkshire Downs in the 1950s and 1960s. Hollinghurst was born in 1954 and his father was bank manager in the market town of Faringdon, the basis for David’s invented hometown of Foxleigh.
It’s not the first time Hollinghurst has written about this area – what he tells me is his “essential landscape” – but it’s the first time he’s followed a narrator brought up there. He gives David several other autobiographical fragments, such as his fondness of mimicking Dennis Price’s Jeeves from the 1960s PG Wodehouse adaptations. And David follows Hollinghurst’s life further, to public school, as a young gay man at Oxford, before diverging as David becomes an actor in an experimental theatre troupe in London.
The driving rats project has opened new and unexpected doors in my behavioural neuroscience research lab. While it's vital to study negative emotions such as fear and stress, positive experiences also shape the brain in significant ways.
As animals – human or otherwise – navigate the unpredictability of life, anticipating positive experiences helps drive a persistence to keep searching for life's rewards. In a world of immediate gratification, these rats offer insights into the neural principles guiding everyday behaviour. Rather than pushing buttons for instant rewards, they remind us that planning, anticipating and enjoying the ride may be key to a healthy brain. That's a lesson my lab rats have taught me well.
Even after more than 90 years, there are still new examples of unprovable statements. It’s probable that far-reaching physical problems, such as the search for a theory of everything, are affected by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.
Beautifully translated from the French by Jessica Moore, the stories plunge the reader into the sensory experiences of varied protagonists, who include translators, students and even a UFO investigator. What they share is an affinity for the sounds of the world around them.
A world laid wonderfully bare in Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media, Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacamo’s rollicking oral history of the New York Post since 1976.
Aside from being a shoo-in for most brilliantly-titled book of the year, it’s a work that chronicles perhaps the last half century in history when newspapers still mattered.
All of this ricocheting around among the diverse facets of language might sound a bit like a game of intellectual hopscotch. By its end, however, not only has the reader been treated to an accessible account of an intrinsically fascinating subject, but Mithen feels that he has all of his pieces “on the table” and is ready to explain “why, when and how” language evolved. He accordingly presents us with a detailed scenario of human evolution in which the “word-like and syntax-like” vocalizations of the earliest bipeds eventually gave way to the use of iconic words and gestures by the australopiths and later on by tool-wielding members of Homo.