Do you know that moment when you realise that life has given you exactly what you wanted, in the easiest way possible, at the best time possible, and in the best order possible, even if you couldn’t recognise it at the time? That’s where I am right now. Here’s how it began.
26th I wonder whether it isn’t the work of artists to bridge the gap between high and low. To make the low appeal to the high and the high to the low, until no one can tell the difference between the two. 20th I finally tracked down a copy of Charles Williams’s Arthurian Poems which I… Read More
I wonder how Tennyson would have described the sight of a cloudless England from 20,000 feet; the shallow land, the molten silver inlets and rivulets, the tips of turning trees and the neatly enclosed patches of green. What would he have seen? How would he have assimilated it into the social consciousness? I watched the… Read More
the life of a writer is always a strange mix of real and retold stories, and it is not worth the effort to tell the difference between the two. i have been reading the life of stratford canning, british diplomat to the ottoman empire during the napoleonic wars and after. i love his style of letter-writing… Read More
Last Sunday I attended a lecture by Margaret Boden. She spoke with great warmth, knowledge and clarity. Good communicators are rare even among eminent scholars and one can almost be forgiven for forgetting that academia is about disseminating knowledge, not just ego-edifices. Her talk was very similar to this one she gave in Oxford a couple… Read More
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