Song of a Reformed Headhunter

TLS September 28 2012 from Noel Malcolm's review of Christopher Brooke's Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and political thought from Lipsius to Rousseau : If you were an educated person in early modern Europe, some elements of Stoicism were in your intellectual bloodstream. You might have possessed only the vaguest ideas about the original Stoic philosophers Zeno or Chrysippus, but the works of Cicero and Seneca had been drummed into you in the schoolroom, and much of the stock wisdom of the age, circulating in commonplaces and sententiae ,  was drawn directly or indirectly from their writings. Virtue, not pleasure, provides real happiness; a virtuous life is lived in accordance with reason; true virtue has no need of external goods; the wise and virtuous man is truly free; and so on. * The Stoics' dismissal of pity (as a weakness and indeed a vice) was hard to square with Christian ethics, and their cult of suicide was quite unacceptable. The notion that all vices were...

TLS February 6 2009 from Michael Stanley-Baker's review of A Dictionary of the Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen : The roots of Chinese medicine lie in the rich textual tradition that began with the Inner Classic of the Yellow Emperor , or Huang Di Nei Jing , compiled over 2,000 years ago. The first organized canon of medical theory, the Inner Classic describes a range of ideas about the structure and patterns of the universe and the human body, from five-phase correlative cosmology, to yin and yang, qi and blood, acupuncture meridians and the relationship between the inner organs.  * "Heaven" and "breath," for example, form the term "weather". Thus "breath" not only animates the human body, but also storms, rainbows and hazy summer days. Small wonder then that Chinese doctors use terms for weather patterns when diagnosing the human body as well.  *** from Ronald Blythe's review of Katherine Swift's The Morville Hours : A book of hours was a...