STEVEN ANDREW is moved beyond words by a historical account of mining in Britain made from the words of the miners themselves
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The father of English history
SYLVIA HIKINS recommends a hugely readable account of the life and thinking of the greatest scholar of the Anglo Saxon period
Bede’s tomb in Durham cathedral
CAILEAN MCBRIDE welcomes a refreshing and timely study of the way officialdom creates structures that exclude LGBT+ rights and humanity
The bard mourns the loss of comrades and troubadours, and looks for consolation with Black Country Jess
CHRIS MOSS relishes the painting and the life story of a self-taught working-class artist from Warrington
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a star-studded adaptation of Ibsen’s play that is devoid of believable humanity
GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin
Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade, Parthenope, Where Dragons Live and Thunderbolts* reviewed by MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE
Bede and the Theory of Everything
Michelle P Brown, Reaktion, £16.95
Whilst not exactly a household name, born 1,300 years ago (673 AD) in the north of England, the Venerable Bede is probably the greatest scholar of the Anglo Saxon period, most famous for his book, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and hence regarded as the father of English history.
Ecclesiastical History starts with the Roman invasion of Britain, covers 800 years of British history, explores political and social life together with the rise of the early Christian church. It remains an important source both of facts, and for what early Anglo Saxon life was like.
But Bede also wrote on a large number of other subjects, science, music, poetry, biblical commentary. One of his early works, On the Nature of Things, is a collection of contemporary theories that includes cosmology, time and arithmetic, and later, Bede calculated the first tide tables and calendar dates.
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