We moved house this summer - so this poem is apt: the 'clocks and carpets and chairs on the lawn all day'. We moved to Maidenhead in Berkshire, so the painting is apt: Stanley Spencer lived and worked most of…
My father has been going through the diaries of his grandfather, Fra (for Francis) Meynell. For reasons that I won't bore you with now, the family name was originally Wood, and Fra's 1st cousin was the Holy Fox, Edward Wood,…
Revolutions invariably eat their children.
It’s an almost inevitable fact of history. The expression was coined by a royalist journalist during the French Revolution, Jacques Mallet du Pan. But perhaps, if tweaking was needed, more often than not revolutions eat their parents. Think Robespierre in France; Trotsky in Soviet Russia; Röhm in Nazi Germany. (more…)
John Stott was scrupulous in attempting to do this. It was a key element of the respect that he garnered amongst those he debated or disagreed. He would unfailingly attempt to honour an opposing position by seeking to understand it from…
I'm haunted by contemporary city life - the millions of parallel lives occupying the same square miles. Christopher Nevinson entitled one of his most striking paintings, The Soul of The Soulless City, and I was thinking about this recently. But…
Having just heard of her death - see WAPO, Guardian, Wiki - it seems appropriate to repost my post from 2010. I can't now remember exactly what I was doing that day, but back in early 1989, I had a couple…
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…
Sacred Treasure This is serious - Turkish Protestant churches sent death threats - directly affects a number of churches that I've regularly spent time with in Turkey. PRAY. My former All Souls colleague Jo Jackson has written a couple of…
So I should be upfront about this one. It's a cheat - because I'm not the instigator of this particular combination - the poet was. And it's one of his best-loved - although the subject matter is not cheering, it's certainly…
If the last Q combo was a chronological mismatch of artist and poet, this one is seasonal. Today’s still been pretty warm for a British September day, so it’s perhaps rather incongruous to be thinking about winter. But a dear friend and colleague, Jennifer, sent me this all too brief poem last week, and so I felt it was a perfect combo contender.
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