Thelma Lovell, Author at Catholic Herald

Thelma Lovell

Self-belief is not enough to make the most of old age

April 09, 2020

The Changing Mind: A Neuroscientist’s Guide to Ageing Well By Daniel Levitin, Penguin Life, 528pp, £18.99/$22.50 Reading this book is a prolonged encounter with déjà vu, which, as its author would no doubt explain, is a fancy French term for “I’ve seen this before”. The Changing Mind belongs to the dual category of popular science

The novelist who defied a spirit-crushing system to achieve greatness

July 25, 2019

Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century By Alexandra Popoff Yale University Press, 424pp, £25/$32.50 Vasily Grossman is one of the towering figures of world literature. Even so, full recognition of his stature is arguably work in progress, though surely helped by the publication this year of the English translation of his 1952 novel Stalingrad. Born in 1905

How Bach turned the Gospel into sound

May 23, 2019

Faith and the arts are natural partners. Both aspire to the fusion of order with a creative leap of the imagination, connecting the ideal with what we experience and perceive. In this regard, music has a special role to play, speaking directly to our emotions through melody and harmony, while connecting with our physical being

Why was Britain’s elite willing to swallow Hitler’s lies?

May 23, 2019

Appeasing Hitler By Tim Bouverie Bodley Head, 512pp, £20/$25 “Not another book on Hitler,” you protest. “Can there be anything more to say?” But the spotlight of Tim Bouverie’s richly detailed Appeasing Hitler is directed less towards the man himself than upon an elite British contingent – diplomats, politicians, socialites and thinkers – who, for

An anthropologist looks at evolution and co-operation

May 09, 2019

“Science is a magnificent force but it is not a teacher of morals.” So observed William Jennings Bryan in Tennessee at the conclusion of the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. Or, to misquote palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould: what does the age of rocks have to do with the Rock of Ages? Against the background noise

Hans Gál: The composer silenced by the Nazis – and musical snobs

March 28, 2019

Centenaries are ten a penny, but here’s one you might not know about: 1919 saw the premiere in Breslau of Hans Gál’s first opera, Der Arzt der Sobeide (“Sobeide’s doctor”). Why does this matter, and who in any case was Gál? We begin with a story. In Edinburgh, in the early 1940s, there was a

The corruption of medicine

March 21, 2019

Can Medicine Be Cured? By Seamus O’Mahony, Head of Zeus, 256pp, £20/$22 Even Jeff Bezos is going to die some time. So are we all, actually. And when that day comes, it sure as hell won’t be an algorithm that we turn to. All of us – the need for a priest aside – will

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