Culture Articles
Peace and conflict
It wasn’t the Odeon, Leicester Square – no red carpet, no ‘A listers’, no paparazzi, no designer gowns – but it was the world premiere of Tony Britten’s (no relation) new film about the development of Benjamin Britten’s pacifist convictions while a pupil at Gresham’s School, Holt in...
The failure of success
Is your attitude to life sharply contrasted between white and black – success or failure? If it is, you may find this slim volume helpful and heart-warming. If it isn’t – rejoice in being blessed with contentment. Jennifer Kavanagh, in her new book The Failure of Success, is deeply concerned...
Tripping the light fantastic
‘Light’, wrote Robert Grosseteste in the thirteenth century, ‘is more exalted and of a nobler and more excellent essence than all corporeal things.’ From the ancient to the early modern world, it was a commonplace that light offered the best way of representing the unrepresentable, namely God. As recently as...
Dancing
Their faces were different, not their on-the-bus faces, or at-work faces, but unveiled, happy faces.
Art as ministry
Complete silence. A gathered Meeting. Rich, unspoken, ministry; expressed through pencil, charcoal and ink. Such was the experience of Friends who gathered for an art-based Meeting for Worship, led by Judith Bromley Nicholls and Linda Murgatroyd, at the close of a recent Quaker Arts Network (QAN) event. Each was given...
War Requiem
I sometimes feel I have never got over the first world war. This is an odd thing to say, since I wasn’t born till long after, and my father only enlisted in 1918. But it still haunts me, and now that Quakers are thinking of marking (but certainly not celebrating)...
Rachel Wilson
It all started in Friends House Library a few years ago when my wife Molly was searching out material for her book on Daniel Baker. He was a seventeenth century naval captain who, according to state papers, became ‘tainted with Quakerism’ and was removed from service. He embarked, instead, on...
The path
Resetting my fickle, twitchy compass, Refinding God’s true North, I get my bearings and Tramp off.
Refraction: Moving images on Palestine
The uneven relationship between Israel and Palestine is the theme for a powerful exhibition at a superb new gallery space, the P21 Gallery, just off London’s Euston Road, near Friends House. Refraction: Moving images on Palestine is art that attempts to come to terms with what is, for some,...
In the labyrinth
In the labyrinth There are no wrong turns And no dead ends. Each step brings you on Inevitably, inexorably, Towards your destination