What We Are Reading Today: ‘Insects of Britain and Europe’

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Updated 18 November 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Insects of Britain and Europe’

Authors: Thomas C. John, Peter Mullen, and Paul D. Brock

Featuring more than 3,000 species and 5,500 color photographs, “Insects of Britain and Europe” is the most detailed and exquisitely illustrated photographic field guide to cover all the insect orders of Europe.

Easy to navigate, clear, accessible and authoritative, the guide focuses on the species most likely to be encountered and the easiest to identify.

It pairs more than 300 state-of-the-art color plates with concise information on diagnostic features, habitat, distribution and flight periods, helping lead any reader toward identification.


What We Are Reading Today: A Defence of Pretence by Indira Ghose

Updated 13 December 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: A Defence of Pretence by Indira Ghose

Is civility merely a matter of reinforcing status and exclud-ing others? Or is it a lubricant in a polarized world, enabling us to overcome tribal loyalties and cooperate for the common good? 
In “A Defence of Pretence,” Indira Ghose argues that it is both. 
Ghose turns to the drama of Shakespeare’s time to explore the notion of civility. The theater, she suggests, was a laboratory where many of the era’s conflicts played out. 
The plays test the precepts found in treatises on civility and show that, in the complexity and confusion of human life, moral purity is an illusion.