Monthly Archives: November 2020

We all laugh, but it’s an odd behaviour if you stop to think about it. Laughter is involuntary and infectious. It starts in the cradle, well before the development of speech, but this innate behaviour blossoms into something that can bring a whole room into uproar. It is found in all cultures and when heard it is recognisable across boundaries of language. All these characteristics strongly suggest that laughter is hard-wired into the human psyche, which immediately conjures the favourite question of every evolutionary biologist: what good is it? Answering that question throws new light on the subject of humour generally and Jewish humour in particular.

Jonathan Silvertown is Professor of Evolutionary Ecology in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh. In addition to numerous research publications, Jonathan has published 4 popular science books on evolutionary topics. The most recent is Dinner with Darwin: Food, Drink and Evolution, published by Chicago University Press in 2017. It has been translated into 8 languages. Comedy of Errors is forthcoming. www.jonathansilvertown.com; Twitter: @JWSilvertown.

If you are on the Lit mailing list you will be sent joining information on the morning of the meeting. If you are not on the Lit list but would like to attend, please register here.

Jack Fairweather will talk about his book, The Volunteer, the story of Witold Pilecki and his remarkable mission in which he gets sent to Auschwitz where he sets up a resistance group, manages to escape and to send an account of life in the camp to the Polish Government in exile in London. In his talk, he will describe how he pieced together a life that had been hidden for decades.

Jack Fairweather is a journalist and award-winning author. He was born in Wales in 1978 and educated at Atlantic College and at Oxford University. He then became a war correspondent embedded with British troops during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and bureau chief for the Daily Telegraph in Baghdad, where he met his wife, who was a New York Times journalist. While he was in Iraq, he survived an attempted kidnapping and an attempted suicide bombing. He now has three children and divides his time between London and Vermont. Jack covered the war in Afghanistan for the Washington Post and his war coverage won him a British Press Award and an Overseas Press Club award citation. The Volunteer is his third book and won the Costa Book Award in 2019, one year after Bart van Es’s The Cut Out Girl.

The Lit has ordered 20 copies of The Volunteer from the Edinburgh Bookshop, 219 Bruntsfield Place, EH10 4DH (just before Holy Corner) for those who are planning to come to the meeting and wish to read the book beforehand. It reads like a thriller and, once you have started it, it is hard to put down. The book is published by Penguin and costs £9.99 but the bookseller has offered to sell them to Lit members with a small discount.

If you are on the Lit mailing list you will be sent joining information on the morning of the meeting. If you are not on the Lit list but would like to attend, please register here.