This blog is moving to: http://ncolloff.blogspot.com entitled 'Golgonooza' (which was Blake's ideal city) partly because some people have had problems with this site - leaving comments have either failed or worse destabilised their own computers; partly because I wanted to be less

Back from Hay with my modest purchases ( Read more... )

Back from America, where I had a fabulous time, and on the plane home, I re-read Martin Buber's 'The Way of Man According to the Teachings of Hasidism'. This is 54 pages of distilled wisdom where Buber, through the lens of a tradition that shaped him, gives mature expression to his own being and thought ( Read more... )

Yesterday I visited the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard with friends ( Read more... )

On my way to Essex University today, I was listening to my latest acquisition (and being antediluvian this was a CD in a player rather than a download to my i-something) from Hesperion XXI. They are a music group of great range and ability. This particular disc is of sixteenth to eighteenth century music from Spain and the 'New World ( Read more... )

I bought a painting. It is by the artist Andrea McLean and it is called 'Conigree'. A 'conigree' is a wood especially attractive to rabbits. England has many such: small, enclosed places of great beauty, and often stillness ( Read more... )

I have re-read Ursula Le Guin's "The Telling". It is a cliche to say 'this is the book that changed my life' but like many cliches it happens to be true ( Read more... )

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With thanks to http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/Read more... )

Today I finished the last volume of Kathleen Raine's autobiographies 'In the Lion's Mouth'. It is an extraordinary volume, telling of her relationship with Gavin Maxwell. It was an asymmetrical relationship - on her side an intensity of self-offering that slipped dangerously into possessiveness, on his an unacknowldeged need to be seen, recognised ( Read more... )

I made a presentation to colleagues this week on 'global trends' especially the shift in power away from 'the West ( Read more... )