Culture Articles
Black Mahler: The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor story, by Charles Elford
I was happy at my Anglican primary school in Croydon, though it was the sixties and it was ‘a different time’. We exited assemblies to the accompaniment of regimental marches played on a gramophone, and were expected to learn our letters from a reading-scheme populated entirely by middle-class children, none...
Jerusalem Odessa
Walk upon the rubble In the Odessa Bar of Jerusalem, they were drinking shell shock from the clouds, by whatever name this place is known no one loves them as much as this; walk upon the rubble, except perhaps their own camouflage leaders. and the collateral crucifixion, Imported weapons of...
Wake brain
WAKE BRAIN, DRAW BREATH, CRY LIFE Return once more to consciousness, the roar of being, of seeing half-bright galaxies roaming overhead, of struggles in foaming floods of alien...
Israelophobia: The newest version of the oldest hatred and what to do about it, by Jake Wallis Simon
Friends may remember an article I wrote just a year ago: ‘Is the Religious Society of Friends antisemitic?’ (30 September 2022). It was based on an analysis of letters and articles in the Friend. It provoked a wide range of responses, not all critical. I haven’t been able to pursue the...
Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig
I have never owned a Barbie. I went into the cinema with roughly the views articulated by politically-savvy teenager Sasha when she first meets Barbie: ‘You’ve been making women feel bad about themselves since you were invented.’
Dear diary
I am so sorry that once again today I have not been able to save the world. Somehow there is never enough time. Problems arise in unexpected places and so, because of me, once more the world will fall apart. All my fault. Of course.
Out of Excuses: The Loving Earth poetry book, edited by Tracey Martin
This is a unique climate text. A colourful book, the size of a double CD, it is part of the Loving Earth Project, which has been exhibited in the UK, France, Belgium and the US.
Meeting
Breath held – while still idling in and out. Breath as a bubble, something caught and sealed. Breath expanding then, becoming its own country, world, see: whole continents of breath.
Odessa Cathedral, July 2023
The rash of wounded cities spreads across the map; I walk Odessa in my mind once more, to join a festival of loss, of torn-up friendships in a poisoned land. Into this sacred space we came together with knees which faithful bent, with lips which kissed the antique ikon of...
A Secular Age (2007), by Charles Taylor, and God’s Funeral (1999), by A N Wilson
There is a (probably apocryphal) story of a meeting between Napoleon Bonaparte and Pierre-Simon Laplace, the astronomer and physicist, in 1802. Napoleon comments that he has heard that Laplace has written ‘a large book on the system of the universe’ without mentioning God at all. Laplace’s cool, perhaps even dismissive,...