Tuesday, 27 September 2016
Chloë Hawkey: ‘We seem to be rediscovering the merits of the rough and the analog. Coloring, with its black lines on a white page, with its rudimentary pencils, offers us experiences often missing in contemporary life: straightforwardness, physicality, slowness, solitude, simplicity.’
Monday, 26 September 2016
Michael Blackburn: ‘Ashdown is right when he says “It’s not our country any more,” — but not for the reason he thinks. “Our country” for him is the country of the political and media establishment, not that of the majority of people in Britain. For the moment at least, the people have shaken that establishment by demanding their country back. And they have made this desire plain in the most peaceable way.’
Friday, 16 September 2016
Michael Blackburn: ‘Both the 9/11 fall and the punking by Pepe show a political class in serious moral and physical decay. If Clinton gets elected all bets are off as to how long she will survive but one thing is certain: Pepe the green cartoon frog will taunt her all the way.’
Sunday, 11 September 2016
Gary Evans: ‘We’re motoring across the fields and down the track in the dark before dawn. The newborn lamb sits tucked away in my coat, zipped right up, so just her little head peeps out. The wind whooshes in my ears, eyes streaming with the cold. An orphan’s only got a couple of hours.’
Wednesday, 7 September 2016
Michael Blackburn: ‘A knowledge of the old adage, “never wear brown in town” would come in useful for coping with those opaques codes. For, as any well-bred fule kno, brown shoes are not to be worn except on one’s country estate. And certainly never with a dark suit.’
Wednesday, 7 September 2016
Alan Wall: ‘Although many of the pieces published in these two impressive volumes would be known already to Wittgensteinians, many more would not. Unless you have not only bought anthologies like Rush Rees’s Recollections of Wittgenstein, but also followed such publications as Guy’s Hospital Reports and the Irish Medical Times, or Hermathena, then some of these essays will be new to you. Together they present a composite image of the man which is hugely impressive. Perhaps each century can produce one man like Wittgenstein; certainly not many more. ‘
Thursday, 1 September 2016
Ben Ryan in Theos: If our Western values are so safe and strong why do they need such aggressive defending? It is because of the crisis afflicting any real sense of Western identity that we have come to rely so heavily on symbols.
Michael Blackburn: ‘So here I sit with the double-parked shelves in front of me and volumes to right and left, wondering what is the point and feeling somewhat guilty. Articles and listicles frequently appear in papers and magazines, goading you with titles you ought (there’s that moral imperative again) to have read and testing your (dis)honesty. Nobody knows if you have read Ulysses or not, especially if they haven’t read it themselves. But when you have read a book and forgotten everything between its covers, it’s almost as if you were bluffing anyway.’
Wednesday, 24 August 2016
James Gallant: ‘There is really no way to get from science to natural theology—or to metaphysics of any kind—without taking seriously questions scientists, qua scientists, have no occasion to ask, and for which there are no empirical answers.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘A lot of green types would like the bicycle to be a solution, but having just spent four days in Amsterdam I can vouch for the fact that walking around a city where cyclists of all ages and sizes coming at you from every direction (and often at speed) is unnerving and downright dangerous. ‘
Peter Riley: ‘By 1945 Calogero had got himself into a fairly dreadful state of hopelessness and was comforted only by his distance from the demands and rewards of urban centrality, in a pastoral location which to him was more real than the university or the state.’
Wednesday, 17 August 2016
Stephen Wade: ‘Arguably, the main barrier to attaining that is a quality of dullness. The snag is that a poet may be dull and not know it. That’s why critics exist. Though they may also be dull, so other critics are needed to tell them. But these critics may be dull so…That’s why we have literary theory.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘Yet the bigwigs are faffing about with this PC nonsense. How will we know if their efforts succeed? We won’t. There is no way of measuring the success or failure of such nonsense. ‘
Michael Blackburn: ‘The overwhelming fear emanating from these anti-populists is not just that of no longer being in control of the agenda but also of no longer being in control of the people. The power of the media to peddle their pacifying PC agenda has weakened. ‘
Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Alan Wall: ‘Although many of the pieces published in these two impressive volumes would be known already to Wittgensteinians, many more would not. Unless you have not only bought anthologies like Rush Rees’s Recollections of Wittgenstein, but also followed such publications as Guy’s Hospital Reports and the Irish Medical Times, or Hermathena, then some of these essays will be new to you. Together they present a composite image of the man which is hugely impressive. Perhaps each century can produce one man like Wittgenstein; certainly not many more. ‘