Mystery Monday: Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death!

Our book today is James Runcie’s Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death, the 2012 entry in his “Grantchester Mysteries,” his series of stories set in the picturesque 1950s English hamlet of Grantchester and starring thirty-something vicar Sidney Chambers, who’s a kind of mild-mannered amateur clerical sleuth in the tradition of C. K. Chesterton’s Father […]

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Ancient Egypt!

Our book today is something simply called Ancient Egypt, a slim 1942 volume from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; it began life as a fairly straightforward guidebook to the museum’s vast and impressive collection of artwork and artifacts from ancient Egypt, which a later editor very accurately characterized as “not the most extensive […]

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Magic Prague!

Our book today is Angelo Maria Ripellino’s utterly wonderful 1973 book Praga Magica, published in 1994 by Picador as Magic Prague, marvelously translated by David Newton Martinelli. It’s a forlorn love-song to the weird city of Prague, written in white heat at the height of Ripellino’s powers, and it’s as beautiful and sui generis a […]

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The Vanished Multitudes in the Penny Press!

The May-June issue of Audubon has a cover story, “From Billions to None” by Barry Yeoman, that takes advantage of a centennial anniversary in its own way every bit as saddening as that of the opening of the First World War: the death in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914 of Martha, the world’s last passenger […]

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