Breaking the Spell

Professor Dennett is a philosopher and an expert on consciousness who writes from the perspective of a Darwinian. He is an atheist and calls himself a ‘bright’, an unfortunate coinage from the redoubtable Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine. I say unfortunate because those who do not identify themselves similarly might feel that they should be thought of as — shall we say — less than bright. Such self-designating and flattering terminology, however, agreeable to those using it, only serves to isolate them from others — but perhaps that is the point. Putting that aside, I also need to put aside another of Dennett’s mostly irrelevant preoccupations in this otherwise carefully considered and nearly exhaustive examination of religion, namely that of the power of memes...

Mr Dixon Disappears

Mr Dixon Disappears once features the magnificently hapless Armstrong — the young, Jewish, duffle-coat wearing librarian who solves crimes, mysteries, and domestic problems whilst driving a mobile library around Northern Ireland. Dixon and Pickering’s, County Antrim’s legendary department store, is preparing to celebrate its centenary. But the elderly Mr Dixon has gone missing, along with £100,000 in cash. It smells, pretty badly, of a kidnap. Israel becomes a suspect in the police investigation and is suspended from his job by his boss, the ever-fearsome Linda Wei. He’s having to fight to clear his name. Does Israel’s acclaimed five-panel touring exhibition showing the history of Dixon and Pickering’s in old photographs and artefacts perhaps hold the key to Mr Dixon’s mysterious disappearance?

The Case of the Missing...

This title introduces Israel Armstrong, one of literature’s most unlikely detectives in the first of a series of novels from the author of the critically acclaimed Ring Road. Israel is an intelligent, shy, passionate, sensitive sort of soul: he’s Jewish; he’s a vegetarian; he could maybe do with losing a little weight. And he’s just arrived in Ireland to take up his first post as a librarian. But the library’s been shut down and Israel ends up stranded on the North Antrim coast driving an old mobile library. There’s nice scenery, but 15,000 fewer books than there should be. Who on earth steals that many books? How? When would they have time to read them all? And is there anywhere in this godforsaken place where he can get a proper cappuccino and a decent newspaper? Israel wants answers...

Muhammad: Prophet ...

From the best-selling writer of The History of God and the widely acclaimed Islam — A Short History, comes Karen Armstrong’s Muhammad. Armstrong has become one of our most important and relevant commentators on religious world affairs today, consistently providing a scholarly but accessible approach to humanity’s relationships with God and religion. To date, there have been very few books written on the Islamic prophet of the religion that is followed by over the 1.2 billion Muslims who make up a fifth of the world’s population. Muhammad’s staggering achievements as a human being quite simply altered the course of history as we know it and continue to this day to inspire humanity. Muslims claim that in 650 AD, at the age of 40, Muhammad had a visitation from the Angel Gabriel telling him that he had been chosen to learn, recite and spread the words of God to man in verses that would later make up the Koran.

The Prophet Muhammad

The Prophet Muhammad is a hero for all mankind. In his lifetime he established a new religion, Islam; a new state, the first united Arabia; and a new literary language, the classical Arabic of the Koran. A generation after his death he would be acknowledged as the founder of a world empire and a new civilisation. Any one of these achievements would have been more than enough to permanently establish his genius. Barnaby Rogerson’s elegant biography not only looks directly at the life of the Prophet Muhammad, but beautifully evokes for western readers the Arabian world into which he was born in 570 AD.