It’s only in very recent times that people have found it uncomfortable to believe in the reality of The Devil. This is in line with the liberal squeamishness about believing in the reality of Hell. Millions across the globe, though, who do not live near University precincts or live in Georgian town houses, still believe […]
The Devil: A Biography by Peter Stanford Read More »
Educated at Edinburgh and Oxford, Kate Clanchy (http://literature.britishcouncil.org/kate-clanchy) lived in London’s East End for several years, before moving to Oxfordshire where she now works as a teacher, journalist and freelance writer. Her 2013 novel has a summary as follows. It’s in response to an advertisement that Struan Robertson, a bright orphan, and just seventeen, leaves his dour native
Meeting the English Read More »
Patrick Gale (http://galewarning.org/about-patrick/) based himself in London after graduating from Oxford in 1983, starting out in a bedsit in Notting Hill. Though his website proudly reports that he “has never had a grown-up job”, Gale supported himself while writing his first novels – The Aerodynamics of Pork (1985), Ease (1985) and Kansas in August (1987) –
A Place Called Winter Read More »
John Gray (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_(philosopher)) has been entertaining us now for years with his trenchant attacks on humanism, global capitalism, campaigning atheism, progress (historical and ethical), The Enlightenment, and any other (as he sees it) variety of flaccid optimism. He has presented these in False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans
The Soul of the Marionette by John Gray Read More »
“You don’t see the connections in your life until it’s too late to disentangle them,” says Alice, a character in Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel. This thought-provoking book is about patterns which are repeated through generations of families and nations. It traces the confluences of the personal and historical, of art and life. We meet Anne Quirk whose life
The Illuminations by Andrew O’Hagan Read More »
One thought troubles me greatly. It is entirely possible to be deluded and live your whole life through happily. A clear example is that hundreds of millions of humans believed that the Sun was moving round the Earth daily. They organised their agriculture, society, calendar and religion around this idea. For them it seems to
The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer Read More »
How well can you really know another person? And how far would you go to find out the truth about him or her? S.J. Watson’s (http://www.sjwatson-books.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._J._Watson) successor to his super-selling debut novel Before I Go To Sleep (2011) turns on a girl who is gone. A young woman called Kate Plummer has been murdered in Paris in
Glass is the first novel of London based writer Alex Christofi (http://alexchristofi.com/) The outline is as follows. Günter Glass, ex-milkman and aspiring window-cleaner, is certainly pure. And he’s pretty transparent. But the jury’s still out on how sharp he is. What naïve young Günter does have is a head for heights and, ever since he
It was only the other night that I was luxuriating in the sounds of the Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Symphoniae-Spiritual-Songs-Hildegard-Bingen/dp/B000026NDI/ref=tag_dpp_lp_edpp_ttl_in) by Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard was in the charts in the 50s. The 1150s, that is. It occured to me that her monophonic compostions would be the ideal background for a recent publication by Robyn Cadwallader (http://robyncadwallader.com/) – ‘The Anchoress’.
