Ireland’s science Nobel Prize winners and Faith
Ireland has only two Nobel Laureates in Science – Ernest Walton and William C Campbell. I am working on a longer post on my perception that there was much more…
Category: commonplace book
“Biography is a thoroughly reprehensible genre”
Only a few days after I made a rather grumpy comment on the quality of the Spectator now, comes this piece by Roger Lewis on the dodginess of biography. Lewis…
“The silent are never at home in our culture again”
Adam DeVille has a fascinating pair of posts (one here, one here) on Maggie Ross‘ Silence: A User’s Guide. Both posts are worth reading in full (and I must now…
“the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you” = J G Ballard on Creativity
A while back I reposted an essay I wrote on Nthposition.com (which is now offline) in which featured a quote from J G Ballard: “Cyril Connolly said that the greatest…
“Where will and power are one” : Dantean Memes
In Inferno, Dante is accompanied by the soul of the poet Virgil. Virgil, amongst other things, has to warn off the various guardians of the underworld to leave the still-living…
“Democracy is a thing which is always breaking down through the complexity of civilisation” – GK Chesterton, Allan Massie and complexity
. As I have recently written, I am reading a collection of Allan Massie’s Life and Letters columns from the Spectator, which is full of shrewd judgments. In particular there…
Sheer “determination to live by the will” : Allan Massie on Widmerpool
I haven’t read much of The Spectator lately; it seems to have less and less of interest. Once, regardless of one’s political views, the literary quality of the magazine was…
10 random quotes from Wikiquote
An exercise in found juxtaposition – ten consecutive results of Wikiquote’s random quote feature. On each page, I will select the quote that corresponds to which iteration I am on…
Séamus Sweeney 