Yesterday was an unusual day. Which is, of course, not exactly news. In these turbulent times, each day tends to reveal its strangeness, especially if you read a newspaper. But for me, it marked the end of a decade's invovlement…
A couple of weeks ago, James Cary invited himself for lunch - and then we hooked up online with our old friend Barry Cooper (now living in Florida, for reasons best known to him and his new wife) for a…
Sacred Treasure Former LibDem leader, Tim Farron has been saying some really important things in the last week about the state and nature of western liberalism. Here is his original Theos lecture: What Kind of Liberalism do we want? Then…
I saw this on twitter the other day (@TheWorkshyFop). One of those laugh out loud moments. Comes from the book Watling Street, which I've not read, and this part reflects on the Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Norman conquest. I remember…
A couple of years ago, I reposted a little thing I had written 5 years before, An Arable Parable. Now that I'm back at my parents' home for a few weeks, I went for a wander in the field last…
An old friend, Ross Hendry, is the chief exec of Spurgeon's Children's Charity, a UK organisation (no, that's not him on the left, that's Spurgeon). The charity was founded by its illustrious namesake, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and continues today to…
This is history writing at its compelling best. Lynne Olson has beavered away to find an original angle on an oft-told story and does it with such force of insight that one's sense of the bigger story is given greater…
London, like many historic cities, forces rich and poor to live cheek by jowl. It always has. It is much less ghettoed than many more modern cities - although house price escalation is changing that. Thus the so-called Royal Borough of…
I can't get yesterday's tweet from veteran BBC man John Simpson out of my head. It was a relief to read it, to be honest. It's retweets and likes meant I'm far from the only one to feel it. June…
Paul Arnold, the coordinator of the Church and Media Network (MediaNet), kindly invited me to write a post this week to point to how Wilderness engages with media issues. So here is the result:
When Jeremy Paxman gave his MacTaggart lecture at the 2007 Edinburgh International Television Festival, he actually created his own headlines. After a spate of scandals at the time, he described how his employer, the BBC, had been left with “a catastrophic, collective loss of nerve,” with the bigger question of whether the corporation “itself has a future.” Those comments are even more relevant today, with many seeking to exploit its insecurity. The precariousness is indicated by the fact that big celebrity guns have been marshalled to speak out in its defence. (more…)