![]() ![]() Readers will recognise many of the author’s interests-neuroscience, art and the ambiguity of selfhood-from novels such as What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Its misleading title suggests a book on sexual politics, but the uniting theme here is borders and the divisions we perceive-often wrongly, Hustvedt argues-not only between men and women, but brain and body, self and others, and the “wobbly categories” of various mental illnesses. ![]() In the introduction to these essays, Siri Hustvedt sees that division as worsening, partly because increased specialisation means that even colleagues working in the same department no longer understand each other’s research. In 1959 the physicist and novelist CP Snow famously described intellectual life in western society as riven into “two cultures”: the best brains in science and the humanities operated in a state of mutual incomprehension of which many were foolishly proud. ![]()
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