Are we hard-wired to feel other people’s pain? And if so, is it necessarily a good thing? Andrew Scull has reviewed three new books on empathy and joins us to tell us more; Charles Dickens's love of all things theatrical – in life as in art – is no secret. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst considers fifty years' worth of Dickens adaptations for the stage (and film)
Books
The Empathy Instinct by Peter Bazalgette
Against Empathy: The case for rational compassion by Paul Bloom
The Invention of Humanity: Equality and cultural difference in world history by Siep Stuurman
Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens (Volume One, edited by Jacky Bratton; Volume Two, edited by Jim Davis
Strange Worlds of Their Own
Robots Working, Humans Reading
Mozart the Happy Harlequin and Lost British Labourism
A Bengali Polymath and an ‘Accidental Modernist’
‘But Where’s the Poetry?!’
D. H. Lawrence in Flames
Jane Austen and Abolition
Angela Thirkell’s Relentless Self-Belief
Pirandello’s Controlled Chaos
Violence Upon the Roads
Underground and on the Run
Getting Shakespeare’s Measure
Philip Roth, For Better, For Worse, Forever?
Dreams of America
Myth-busting, awkwardness, pure Marvellousness
Vivian Gornick’s Time
Avoidance and absurdity
Ishiguro’s AI and Grendel’s Mother
Nostalgia, Outsiders and "Rubber Tramps"
Weapons, Grouse and Red Herrings
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