Culture Articles
What lies ahead
Mashed into the last summer sunshine cold wind, a paper-cut barb Hints at winter ahead. Though told that warmth would banish this virus it hovers still, a vulture that threatens our fresh horizons Corralls us back into our cups Of joys, miseries and memories.
Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation, by Richard Bauckham
Richard Bauckham, a former professor of New Testament Studies, invites us to rediscover our membership of the Community of Creation. This community is larger than the community of humankind. It consists of many species, some extinct, others recently born.
Choosing Life: My father’s journey in film from Hollywood to Hiroshima, by Leslie A Sussan
I should say up front: Leslie Sussan and I are both members of Bethesda Meeting in Maryland, USA. She has been working on this book about her father, Herb Sussan, for thirty years.
Conspiracy, directed by Frank Pierson
I recently plucked up courage to watch this film, which I have had on my shelves since I bought it in a charity shop a couple of years ago. It is a hard watch but essential viewing, increasingly so with the resurgence of fascism in the world.
The Book of Trespass: Crossing the lines that divide us, by Nick Hayes
Nick Hayes’ fascinating and provocative book is a tearing away of much of the pretence of British history. A nation’s view of itself is rarely realistic and in our case the fabrications are literally set in stone. The great houses and estates of the land are, if we care...
Ground zero
Rain is all mist without fall, and mottled with grey motions, the sky. There’s a sea-roar in that fruitless sycamore, and eucalyptus leads the cheer, throwing jackdaws in streaming perichoresis about a pale, unblooded sky.
The proud old lineage
We Poets of the proud old lineage Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why (James Elroy Flecker) When found, they are free to follow their imaginations, gladly, wherever they may lead:
Practical Mystics: Quaker faith in action by Jennifer Kavanagh
‘Oh, Jonathan – the Quakers? Lovely people, but completely impractical!’ This was the polite (but stinging) verdict, sometime in the early 1990s, on my latest head-in-the-clouds, ‘Manchester Guardian’ venture – attending Quaker Meeting in Wandsworth. It was delivered by Mrs O, the elderly mother of an old school friend, who had introduced...
Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo, by Philippe Lançon
This riveting book, which I discovered by accident in a secondhand bookshop, transcended the rest of my lockdown book pile. Philippe Lançon is the journalist who ‘played dead’ when terrorists burst into the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015. This account is a story of...
Wild Olympians
And still they come – in impossible inflatables – The pregnant, the children, men, stubbled And hollow-eyed with desperation. Dwarfed by towering tankers, their tiny boats Pitched and tilted, precipitously, by ferries’ careless wakes.