“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…
Category: time passes
Review of “Life Ascending”, Nick Lane, Eurotimes July 2009
This fine book on evolution was well reviewed at the time and won the 2010 Royal Society prize for science books. Here is my review from Eurotimes . Or rather…
“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…
Cosmic Walk, Cabragh Wetlands Centre, Tipperary
Near Thurles, on the road to Holycross, one finds Cabragh Wetlands Centre, which is the site of the transformation of the marshes around an old Irish Sugar factory into a…
T.S. Eliot: Ash Wednesday
Originally posted on The Broken Towers:
Today is Ash Wednesday and although I did not want to provide a reading of a long poem for some time, I thought not…
Séamus Sweeney 