We are beginning to get back to more regular patterns and so on Tuesday it was my official day off. I like to read on those days and so I picked up a book I bought on holiday in a charity shop. It is Melvyn Bragg on Twelve Books the changed the world. It came out in 2006 and was apparently accompanied by a series of four programmes on ITV, each an hour long. Not that I noticed. The books he chose are all English ones and some are not quite what you would call books Some were a bit sniffy about it but I enjoyed it (not quite finished as I write).
In the end he went for
Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton; Married Love by Marie Stopes; Magna Carta; the Rules of Association Football' On the Origin of Species by Darwin; On the Abolition of the Slave Trade by Wilberforce; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft' Experimental Researches in Electricity by Faraday' Richard Arkwright's patent specification for his "Spinning Machine"; The King James Bible; The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith; The First Folio by William Shakespeare.
by including the KJV and Darwin and Newton and Faraday and Magna Carta for that matter Bragg has to touch on higher things and he does on those books and others and whole not forsaking the liberal humanist stance he has long embraced I thought he was pretty judicious and is well worth a read.
In the middle of the day I popped in to Chipotle for lunch and in the evening watched an episode of the crime drama Ridley that we had recorded.
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