Cover of the paperback edition of Nudge (2021,”final” edition)
The traditional measure of academic significance, invented way back in the 1960s, is the citation index. If a paper is cited, then it has significance for other researchers. If we count the …
Reading Time: 4minutesThe TLS: around 35 book reviews every week
It is a commonplace that nobody reads any more – the Web has put a stop to all that. I googled “Has the Internet destroyed reading?” and got 378 million hits, including (among …
Reading Time: 2minutesThis is the time of year when the newspapers announce their books of the year. Unfortunately, the reviewers often praise each other’s books, or simply state they couldn’t put it down, without explaining why. Things are a bit different here; every …
The second year of the Text Analytics Forum took place Washington, DC, last week, and it was good to see the conference building from its first iteration and developing in range. Tom Reamy, the conference chair and organiser, has shaped this …
Reading Time: 3minutesThat word “modern”, of course, always raises problems. As soon as you label a book as “modern” it appears outdated very quickly. So the Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, first published 1977, now looks very dated. Nonetheless, a title that …
I hesitate to criticize Pevsner’s Buildings of England series; I have used the books with immense pleasure for many years. Pevsner appears not only to have seen everything, but to have an informed and perceptive (and often pointed ) comment about …
Reading Time: 3minutesHistropedia is a site that enables you to create timelines from Wikipedia entries. According to the two founders of Histropedia (a very klunky name, which makes me think of histrionics), it is “a new type of website that will transform the …
Reading Time: 2minutesAndrew Brown: A Brief History of Encyclopaedias
(Hesperus, 2011)
Anyone who includes spoof encyclopedia titles on the book cover (A Complete Guide to Dysslexia), and starts a book about encyclopedias with a joke can’t be entirely dismissed. Andrew Brown …
This is the time of year when the newspapers announce their books of the year. Unfortunately, the reviewers often praise each other’s books, or simply state they couldn’t put it down, without explaining why. Things are a bit different here; every …
That word “modern”, of course, always raises problems. As soon as you label a book as “modern” it appears outdated very quickly. So the Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, first published 1977, now looks very dated. Nonetheless, a title that …