Kermode to Chaucer

On authors in my recommended reading.

His publisher, Alan Samson, at Weidenfeld & Nicolson said Kermode would probably be most remembered for The Sense of An Ending, his collection of lectures on the relationship of fiction to concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis, first published in 1967, as well as for Romantic Image, a study of the Romantic movement up until WB Yeats. --Alison Flood (via Arts & Letters Daily)

[Adam] Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “turned the tables” on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that society enslaved man to vanity and ambition. Smith argued, instead, that society taught man to be good. This tuition started from man’s capacity for “sympathy”: his ability to feel what another man feels. ...
     Smith’s greatest work, The Wealth of Nations, was a “very violent attack” on Britain’s commercial policies, which misdirected the nation’s energies, weakened its colonies and plunged it into deep rivalries with its neighbours, all in the mistaken belief that a nation’s wealth lay in the gold and silver it hoarded. ... --The Economist

in a paper in the journal [Early Science and Medicine], [Michael H.] Shank suggests that Copernicus’s monumental On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres may have been a response to commentaries then circulating in late-medieval European universities. In particular, Shank cites the work of Francesco Capuano, a Padua teacher of astronomy and the mathematical sciences, and a contemporary of Copernicus. --Terry Devitt

Evidently, they didn't have spell check in Chaucer's day! --Ziggy's parrot