Song of a Reformed Headhunter

TLS July 10, 2009 from Alex Burghat's review of Danielle Westerhof's "Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England": The tight-knit relationship of body and soul was thought to continue even after death. The Church preached a connection between putrefaction and sin--whereas run-of-the-mill cadavers decayed, the bodies of the saints remained as incorrupt on Earth as their souls would be in Heaven. . . . Medieval nobles, Westerhof shows, extended this idea by seeking to conserve the form of their bodies, even in death. The crucial factor in this was the developing mindset of a new knightly caste which strongly valued and guarded its own physical prowess. So it was that the bodies which were preserved in life by ornate armour were, after death, preserved through embalming or (by the early thirteenth century) in stone effigy. *** from Guy Dammann's review of the Aldeburgh Festival 2009: Readers of Paul Griffiths's invaluable book Modern Music learn on the first p...

TLS January 9 2009 from Sandra Knapp's review of John Hemming's Tree of Rivers: The story of the Amazon : Undeterred [Alfred Russel] Wallace wrote a book about his travels, then immediately set off for South East Asia, from where he sent a famous latter to Darwin enclosing an essay entitled "On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type"--which goaded Darwin into completing his masterpiece On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection . * Seeds of Hevea brasiliensis had earlier been planted with great success in Malaysia, and establishing a source of quinine was deemed equally important. Some might characterize this as stealing or, more hysterically, as "biopiracy", but plants of importance have always been taken by people wherever they go. Coffee, for example, now the mainstay of many Amazonian economies, was taken from Ethiopia--I suspect if you asked many people where coffee was native, they might say Brazil. *** from...