Harry Stein: Who knew, for example, that the Breton bonnet Charlotte Corday wore in the tumbrel en route to the guillotine would give rise to a fashion craze? (And, yet, knowing, who can truly be surprised?) But after a while, even such details become suspect.
Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé: In commenting on the labours and life of this man I invite the reader to accompany me on a journey, always sad, often frightful, at times ominous. Those who feel a repugnance on entering hospitals, courts of justice, prisons, and who are afraid to pass through a cemetery at night, had best keep away. Part one of a five-part series.
Anthony O’Hear: The main objection to a hung parliament is that it will involve horse-trading, ‘messy’ compromises and sordid lobbying for power, as if such behaviour was not already the norm within political parties, and as if political parties ever did anything other than seek their own power and growth.
Katharine Tynan: Francis Thompson’s place in the poetry stands somewhere between Crashaw and Shelley, with each of whom he had affinities. He had the lofty spiritual passion and flight, “the flaming heart” of Crashaw, and he had the disembodied passion of Shelley, which had as much to do with common humanity and its wrongs and suffering as the cloud and the lark that Shelley rightly sang.
Ellen Eve Frank: Literary architecture is, consequently, an alive “reasonable structure”: it is a body with a soul. In this context, the building of literary architecture is a composing of pregnant forms: it is pro-creative and full of care.
Anthony O’Hear: Equality of opportunity is only equality of outcome one stage further back….Equality of opportunity is the politically acceptable face of egalitarianism, which pretends to allow us to enjoy equality in a social and political sense, while keeping the rewards we may get from any work, luck or talent we may do or have. Not surprisingly such a confused and confusing vision is at the heart of the ‘new’ Labour project, but what had come to irk me was that post-1997 (and possibly earlier) ‘equality of opportunity’ has come to be a central plank of nice (or ‘compassionate’) conservatism.
Alan Macfarlane, on arranging books: If we are to understand these changing paradigms in the past, and the way they swing in the present, we should note that they seem to shadow political relations and the rate of economic progress. The general rule appears to be that in periods of rapid economic and technological growth, especially when this is linked to political dominance and expansion by a certain civilization, confidence rises and optimistic, ‘progressive’ and teleological theories dominate.
Anthony O’Hear: There is no voice offering an alternative to the soft totalitarianism we have become so used to, or proposing any dismantling of the great leviathan bearing down on individual souls. That leviathan gained ground because people believed that it could remedy weaknesses inherent in the human condition, which in another age might have been seen as the inevitable outcome of original sin.
Denis Boyles: Governments run on money, and the wonderful thing about the euro up until now has been that the government of, say, Greece, ran just as inefficiently on German euros as it did on Greek ones. Eventually, as common sense would suggest, it all must chug to a stop and fall apart.
Wednesday, 3 February 2010
Anthony O’Hear: I have no wish to be polemical here. I want simply to suggest that, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, the most rewarding antidote to the mindlessness of the present, whether it be the insufferable complacency and narrowness of our leaders, or the banality and parochialism of the worlds of television and celebrity, is entry into the conversation which began with Homer – and which has continued (more or less) ever since, until perhaps now.
Thursday, 14 January 2010
Anthony O’Hear: One of philosophy’s longest known but best concealed secrets is that science itself is, in a certain sense, irrational. Its irrationality derives from the fact that scientific knowledge, if we have any, depends on the assumption that the universe is ordered, at least to the extent that things we have observed and discovered in the past are a good guide to the future we have not yet experienced.
George Henry Lewes: In the struggle of life with the facts of existence, Science is a bringer of aid; in the struggle of the soul with the mystery of existence, Science is a bringer of light. As doctrine and discipline its beneficence is far-reaching. Yet this latest-born of the three great agents of civilisation—Religion, Common-Sense, and Science—is so little appreciated by the world at large that even men of culture may still be found who boast of their indifference to it, while others regard it with a vague dread which expresses itself in a dislike, sometimes sharpened into hatred. [This article is published with an attached comment by P. Anderson-Morshead.]
Thursday, 17 December 2009
Anthony O’Hear: In 2011 it is hard not be disturbed Darwin’s casual reference to the elimination of endless numbers of lower races, and even more by the way this sort of thinking was taken up by his followers such as Haeckel and von Treitschke, who in turn influenced Hitler. Moreover the remark in question is all of a piece with the teaching of The Descent of Man, even if more forcefully expressed.
Saturday, 14 November 2009
H. R. Haxton: With…the kindliness of a skilled soldier who admonishes a camp-follower, he has, on two or three occasions, indicated to the writer some of the distinctions between good sword-play and mere battery. And, with his reluctant permission, I have of these wayside words made some semblance of the thing he most abhors—an “interview.”
W.E. Garrett Fisher: The announcement of the sad death of Mr. Percy S. Pilcher, from an accident to his artificial wings on the 20th of September [1899], was probably the first intimation that people at large had of his experiments. They are highly characteristic, however, of the new departure which has been taken by the art of flight in the last ten years.
Britain’s Balanced Politics.
Anthony O’Hear: The main objection to a hung parliament is that it will involve horse-trading, ‘messy’ compromises and sordid lobbying for power, as if such behaviour was not already the norm within political parties, and as if political parties ever did anything other than seek their own power and growth.