Nets full of books

Some excellent publications reach me today.

The new issue of the London Review of Books (it's not just book reviews, but it is from London).

Geoffrey Trease's Bows Against The Barons: a reprint (can't afford the original) of a 1934 Communist-ish version of the Robin Hood story. I intend to put it up with various aristocratic versions in one of my modules to trace the class tension in this legend.

Alfred Fairbank's A Book of Scripts - a stunning 1955 hardcover illustrated reprint of a book about handwriting and the evolution of scripts. Yes, I know nobody writes anything by hand anymore, but it's still interesting and beautiful. There are all sorts of interesting things about our ascent to literacy: did you know that we still have no firm idea about whether people ever read silently until the 18th century?

Sharon O'Dair's Class, Critics and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars. Why did Shakespeare become the property of the toffs?

John Le Carré's new one, Our Kind of Traitor. His Cold War spy novels worked on the basis that you couldn't trust your side or their's, and that morality, loyalty, patriotism and ideology were all mutable and untrustworthy - the end of the Cold War didn't kill this stuff off - he's become more relevant (and even more passionate).

Finally, and mostly to drive my office colleagues out of the room, Stockhausen's Mantra. Does anyone else think he looks like Andrew Marr?

Jump into the pool of books

Obviously I have loads to do, so I've been ordering books. Not, thanks to my iron will and steely resolve, all the ones I want from the three weighty newspapers I eviscerated this weekend, but some. All this furrowed-brow treatment of the Jackson story in the formerly serious press (presumably feeling that it's their chance for redemption after ignoring Hendrix and Presley's deaths) has given me a thirst for some theory, so I've gone for some classic Habermas - The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Theory of Communicative Action (only in translation), Philip Reeve's prequel to his wonderful Mortal Engines series, Fever Crumb, Nick Turse's book about the militarisation of corporate life (or the corporatisation of military life), The Complex (nothing new: the Roman Empire became a tax machine to keep the army going, leading to its collapse), and for some light relief mixed with adult morality, Le Carré's A Most Wanted Man.