George Orwell and the “process of life”
From Dan Hitchens, Orwell and Contraception In all of Evelyn Waugh’s novels up to Brideshead Revisited, Orwell detected a consistent theme: Waugh’s “private ideal” of “a middle-sized country house.” In each…
Category: commonplace book
Adam deVille on the romanticisation of monasticism
From a lengthy review of Rod Dreher’s new book “The Benedict Option.” I used to occasionally read Dreher’s blog, and tried his “The Little Way of Ruthie Leming”, but drifted…
“sound as a way of sense-making”
Sound Artist Lawrence English on the Power of Radical Listening From Observer.com Interview here How did you become interested in working with sound as a creative medium? When I…
Yeats on Kipling: “I dislike his works so much that I feel sure it must have something to teach me”
(edit 30th August 2018 – for more on the uneasy relationship between another poet and Yeats, see here. For a TLS letter which also features Kipling (in a perhaps less than…
“People who are not expecting to cry will cry.”
I would not necessarily expected to have found an article on what will happen when Queen Elizabeth II dies as gripping as I did, but Sam Knight’s piece in the Guardian is…
George Steiner on music (from “Real Presences”)
The meanings of the meaning of music transcend. It has long been, and continues to be, the unwritten theology of those who lack or reject any formal creed. Or to…
George Steiner on secondary culture in 1989
Each day, via journalism, via the journalistic-academic, the inherent value, the productive powers the savings embodied in a creative currency, this is the say in the vitality of the aesthetic,…
“Teach us to care and not to care/ Teach us to sit still.” Ash Wednesday
An Ash Wednesday I’ll Never Forget: Chesterton did not actually say that those of us who don’t believe in God will believe in anything, but he ought to have because…
Séamus Sweeney 