I have bought Penguin's anthology of the writings of Simone Weil. I have most of the contents elsewhere but good to have some of the best gathered in one place and there is a substantial and welcome introduction too ( Read more... )

Driving along in my automobile and listening to Shaker songs - an album ( Read more... )

Why is this a celebrated opera ( Read more... )

Both articles below are drawn from today's Independent and demonstrate rather different contexts for living out a clerical life ( Read more... )

Finished Dalrymple's 'Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India' and highly topical given this week's bombing of the the shrine of Lahore's patron saint, Ali Hajvery Data Ganj Bakhsh: the heart of a 1,000-year-old centre of Sufi Islam in Pakistan. The religion of cutting edges trying to shape boundaries around 'authentic' Islam, offended ( Read more... )

Imagination is the primary faculty of the soul and that imagination is a polytheist might be the shortest summation of Patrick Harpur’s entertaining, erudite and image provoking book. We see the world through a soul’s eye and what we see depends on which ‘god(s)’ or ‘archetype(s)’ we presently inhabit (or are inhabited by ( Read more... )

Watching Capra's original and restored version of the film last night - more than 25 minutes were cut to 'soften' its pacifism. It is a strange admixture of quietly intelligent homespun philosophy and strained melodrama - especially in Conway's younger brother whose immediate dislike of Shangri-La is never wholly comprehensible ( Read more... )

In Orion magazine today it was the rapidity with which big dams are silting up - not content with displacing people, significantly altering downstream flow patterns, fertility and eco-systems, they apparently will 'work' for much shorter periods than projected, making the havoc they cause more difficult to justify in retrospect. No doubt people ( Read more... )

I had not been to Bournemouth for uncounted decades but finally having settled on where to live (by in fact deciding to go nowhere), I took off for two days by the sea and a wave of nostalgia (and practical geographical proximity) took me to Bournemouth ( Read more... )

When asked what book they (the five candidates) would recommend reading for pleasure, Ed Balls replied, 'Middlemarch'! Gets my vote (if I had one ( Read more... )