Back to the books

In my absence, the flow of lovely books did not stop. Today's haul included Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, a classic detailing the period in which religion and politics were nigh on indistinguishable, and in which political radicalism and heresy often went together. Thanks to Norbert for the recommendation! I've also dived into European literature - which we, and certainly I, shamefully neglect. I've bought Cees Nooteboom's postmodern The Following Story and volume 1 of Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance: a novel. One day, I promise myself, I'll be able to read it in the original. I can read French and with some effort, Welsh, but I'm continually ashamed of my limited abilities in languages.

What else? A collection of Margaret Atwood's essays called Curious Pursuits, and David Horspool's The English Rebel: One Thousand Years of Troublemaking from the Normans to the Nineties. It looks like a slightly more conservative companion to Vallance's A Radical History of Britain. I love this stuff because despite the many evils perpetrated by English and then British imperialism, the British are also recalcitrant bunch who don't want to be pushed around. You decapitated a king before the French and staged numerous other revolts from the Peasants to the Poll Tax. Revive that tradition!

I also received a replacement Danish Literature Tree and Renaissance Tree posters - very beautiful.