Culture Articles
Double exposure: Jonathan Doering starts a conversation about race
Covid lockdown was a strange time for everyone, but my family and I were lucky. My wife and I had jobs that were manageable from home, our son was well-provided with schoolwork, and we were living in a beautiful part of South Yorkshire. Our living-room window looked out over the...
Bring to book: Alison Leonard takes a prompt
When the author Hilary Mantel died, her many admirers realised there would be no more magical novels, no more of her incisive commentary, or heartbreaking accounts of topics like women’s illness. Six months later, however, it was revealed that Mantel’s next work would have taken quite a departure....
Is He Out There? Debating The God Delusion, by Paul Laffan
This book is essential reading, but what an awful title! Is He Out There? We Quakers, connoisseurs of interiority (and somewhat scientifically minded too, on a good day), know the answer to that question. But this book is not an exercise in sifting false from true religion. Here, Paul Laffan...
The Good Prison Officer: Inside perspectives, edited by Andi Brierley
This book is written by past prisoners, all of whom are now professional practitioners and educators in the criminal justice field. They draw on lived experience, as well as diverse literature on penal policy, to explore examples of professional practice.
The day and the seed of small things
How will it come, the day of small things between the heart-break and herb robert; the rape and the ox-eye daisies?
75 Years of Stories: Caux 1946-2021, by Initiatives of Change Switzerland
This is a remarkable book of personal stories, all of which took place at the Caux Palace Hotel in Switzerland. In 1946 this 500-bed hotel was about to be pulled down. It had been a refugee centre through much of world war two, and was in disrepair. But 100 Swiss who were...
Scree at Pendle Hill
i Metal pins heal warts, ground-to-cloud lightning strikes the summit, nightmares the yellow sun of St. John’s Wort might soothe, arthritic...
Time For Socialism: Dispatches from a world on Fire, 2016-2021, by Thomas Piketty
This book is a call for more socialism. It also presents a case for the redesign of the European Union. Thomas Piketty envisages a large-scale re-distribution of income, using progressive taxation on super-rich corporations and individuals, whose wealth has increased by an astonishing amount since the low tax regimes inaugurated...
Style or Not to Style, That is the Question: A story of the book, by Gaia Vince
This short (ninety-page) book is imaginatively and clearly presented. It tells the story of the printed word, from the earliest of times until the present day. In particular, it tells the story of the printed word in York – and who better to tell the story than Michael Sessions, a director...
Come to good
I will not break a bruised reed. I broke a bruised reed. I did not come to own the world. I tried to own the world. I never blew out a sputtering candle I extinguished the wavering wick.