Alexander Masters, Dido Davies and William Gerhardie
Having just blogged about Cornelius Medvei, and his friendship with the writer Alexander Masters, I came across a connection between Masters and a recurrent subject of this blog – the…
Category: commonplace book
Cornelius Medvei: “We don’t take characters and develop them; we set ourselves writing puzzles and try to solve them”
The Making of Mr Bolsover is a novel which it is relatively easy to find critical words phrases to describe – mock-heroic, deadpan, quietly subversive – yet each leaves one…
From “The Making of Mr Bolsover”, Cornelius Medvei
Perhaps then, Mr Cruikshank suggested, he would like to tell everyone which political figures he did admire. Without hesitation Mr Bolsover named Lord Salisbury, Queen Victoria’s last prime minister. Amid…
Leandro Herrero: Never Sell Your Time
I have blogged quite a few posts featuring the work of Leandro Herrero on my other, more medical blog. His observation that a team is not a meeting. And that…
Mourinho at Baselworld
It is hard to parody the overheated rhetoric of the luxury watch business’ merchandising arm. In his book Timekeepers, Simon Garfield has some very funny passages on the world of…
“False tension between the Christian and classical worlds”: from Victor Watts’ Preface to his translation of “The Consolation of Philosophy”, Boethius
A while ago I blogged about Albrecht Durer’s engraving of St Jerome in his study. I linked to and quoted an article on St Jerome by James R Edwards which…
“his ideas have a curious tendency to come to life” – Therese Scarpelli Cory on studying Aquinas
From Medievalists.net, an interesting interview with Therese Scarpelli Cory, Professor of Philosophy and author of Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge. I found the following passage particularly interesting: So when I had…
“Ample food and sleep” : A thought on retrospective diagnosis, visions and full bellies
From Geoffrey Moorhouse’s fine bookSun Dancing A clinical diagnosis of Aedh’s erotic and other visions would doubtless have concluded that , whatever shaped them in his psyche, they were triggered…
Séamus Sweeney 