Roscover’s Obama: BURDENED
Last week’s Time magazine had a poignant article about the loneliness of the Presidency as part of its coverage of the first year of Obama’s inauguration. Obama and the Loneliest Job It’s worth a read and is not particularly partisan or political. Who’d ever want the job, when all is said and done? But the […]
Never as bad as we could be, sure; but never as good as we should be…
One of the most unsettling things in recent years is how the rosy-tinted, enlightenment perception of human nature has persisted for years, despite relentless evidence to the contrary. It staggers me that after the 20th Century we can still persist in thinking that we’re all basically good, just dependent on right circumstances. It’s just wishful […]
Earth has not anything to show more fair…
After doing a hospital visit at Tommy’s yesterday afternoon, I walked back across Westminster bridge to catch the tube – and the sunset was truly spectacular. So couldn’t resist a couple of snaps – not great image quality as it was with a phone but still impressionistic At this point, we could do much worse […]
Avatar hoo-haa -a sledgehammer to crack Pandora’s box
When the Mayor of London starts writing about aliens, as Boris Johnson did in yesterday’s Telegraph, you know that something rather extraordinary has happened. (Incidentally, politics aside, Boris’ column is a wonderful guilty pleasure!) But it seems that he and I were provoked to scribble having both seen the biggest grossing movie of the aeon this […]
Vanishing in the digital age
Have you ever wondered about disappearing? I’m not talking about Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak (although that would certainly come in handy on occasion). No, I mean disappearing like Jason Bourne: forging plausible identities, making new starts, covering old traces, laying false trails. Hiding, essentially. Now before you start worrying, panic not – I’m not considering […]
Uncle John’s farewell: an inescapable call to be radical
You wouldn’t expect John Stott to change his tune in his 89th year. And of course he hasn’t. The Radical Disciple is his 51st book – and while his thinking has developed and deepened over the decades, he has never changed direction. He’s always faced Jesus – and he does so all the more eagerly […]
The Sympathy of Melancholy: Orhan Pamuk’s SNOW
There is a play on words that gets lost in translation from Turkish into English. I am by no means a Turkish speaker (as if), and I only discovered it when looking up information about the town in which Orhan Pamuk’s celebrated 2002 book is set. Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006 […]
“You’re going to LOVE this!” Sam Allberry on the Resurrection
Weird. Books on the Resurrection are like proverbial London buses. None for ages, then several appear at the same time. Don Carson has SCANDALOUS – The Cross & Resurrection coming out in February; Adrian Warnock, doctor and uberblogger, has one out specifically on the resurrection (Raised with Christ) and so does Sam Allberry. But Raised with Christ […]
Turkmenbashi and the curse of Ozymandias
President Niyazov was mad, bad and dangerous to know – ruler of Turkmenistan from the fall of the Soviet Union until his death just before Christmas 2006 – and known as Turkmenbashi (= ‘Head of all Turkmens’). I posted about that event a bit as it happened. But he’s reappeared on my radar this week […]
A pile of pebbles and web pros and cons
Am thoroughly enjoying Clay Shirky’s HERE COMES EVERYBODY – only half way thru still as I got interrupted by a number of other more urgent reading assignments. Will definitely be posting more on it when done. Web Cons But this little excerpt definitely struck a chord with my relentless battle with the inbox. In a […]
The 6-word novel… or just another soundbite?
I came across this little article about 6-word memoirs through the wonders of StumbleUpon – the challenge derives from Ernest Hemingway who proved that he could write a 6-word ‘novel’. This was his offering: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. Genius – it perfectly, achingly, succinctly evokes everything. At one level, nothing more needs saying. […]
Brian Godawa’s Word Pictures – another plea to read well
Brian Godawa’s latest book Word Pictures is a stimulating read. His day-job is writing screenplays (some of which actually get made into films – no mean feat!) – which has qualified him as an insider to write the excellent (and recently revised) Hollywood Worldviews – easily the best thing I’ve read on engaging with cinema (he has an […]
