Category: Statecraft & Culture

What would the builder from Nazareth think about Christianity? Would he be a Christian? Nazareth was not even a one horse town by the way. So whatever you think of the present state of Christianity, its rise from Hicksville to global is intriguing. Somebody said the other day Jesus was a Sophist, with the gift…

It’s 11p.m. After a long-shift at the office a woman presses the up-button to summon the multi-storey car park elevator. Her car is on Floor 12. The lift-doors crank open. Four males, beer cans in hand refuse to move. Does she step in? Now, students of organisational behaviour are meant to know this stuff. Folks in…

Playfulness in language as a notion hovers alongside the conventional informational telling of Western social-history. Where our fact-based education teaches us to learn time events, and believe this was ‘us’, turning to consider ‘the way we express’ our world offers potential. The history of the modern literature canon is a story of playfulness, or its…

**Reflections on poet Norman Nicholson, born Millom 1914** ‘Have you been to London? My grandmother asked. ‘No.’ China dogs on the mantelshelf, Paper blinds at the window, Three generations simmering on the bright black lead, And a kettle filled to the neb, Spilled over long ago. The constant tension within the English spirit is between its…

Answers on a postcard please. Modernity might have ‘started’ when the ploughboy opened his double-entry bookkeeping system?  Or when pints replaced flagons. Or Henry the VIII asked for ‘pastrami-triple-deck-on-rye-no-butter-no-olives-with-double-decaff-skinny-latte-soy-no-sugar’? A concept still difficult at most British cafés! Although if Kolakowski’s right, no person can conceive of the Age they are in. So, if you’re praising…

GILLIAN Clark’s letter to Carol Ann-Duffy says*: “The pre-[Sylvia] Plath generation of British students had studied old dead men and, marvellous as they were/are, they were a scold’s bridle on any idea that women too could be poets. In speaking when she did, Plath fired the wild hearts of the last silenced generation of poets…

IS Britain becoming socially and intellectually conservative? It’s a confusing picture. David Swartz suggests that in the 60s and 70s you could be on the religious right in America but be ‘anti-war, internationalist and pro-government intervention on poverty’. Such a careful and then commonly nuanced position has now been swept up into a more hard-line…

KARL Rossman lands shame-faced and exiled on the shores of the US, hotfoot from Europe and his sketchy past, to scratch a new existence in Kafka’s 1926 America. Being an intelligent mannered youth in unfamiliar territory means he feels the horror of his vulnerability but remains overawed by his streetlevel encounters. The scale of American…

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us… Eliot goes on to offer his barren images in The Waste Land, 1922. In…