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Index: The Fortnightly Review of Books

Dostoyevski and the religion of suffering 2.

Thursday, 27 May 2010

Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé: During his last year of freedom (before going to prison) the obsession of imaginary maladies, trouble with his nerves, and a “mystic fright,” were driving him straight into a state of mental derangement, and we can believe him. He assures us that he was only saved by the sudden change in his manner of life, for it compelled him to brace himself against the misfortunes which had hitherto mastered him. I accept this statement, for the secrets of the soul are unassailable; and it is certain that there is nothing better to cure an imaginary illness than real misfortune.

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Far from the clockwork universe.

Tuesday, 18 May 2010

Anthony O’Hear: Perhaps our days are not quite so tolerant, after all. The two figures who loom over the book as a whole and over many of the individual chapters are the now largely forgotten nineteenth century writers, Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper. Both argued noisily and vociferously that religion in general and Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, in particular had been major obstacles to scientific progress and discovery, and it is against this view that most of the articles are directed.

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Invented urination in Paris.

Saturday, 15 May 2010

 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.

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Dostoyevski and the religion of suffering 1.

Sunday, 9 May 2010

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.

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Francis Thompson: A boy and his dog.

Sunday, 25 April 2010

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.

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Listening to the Dead.

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.

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A Man of Letters.

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.”

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The Production and Life of Books.

Tuesday, 4 August 2009

C. Kegan Paul: ‘It may seem an obvious matter that no one has any business to write if he have not something definite to say, which is, or at least appears, worth saying. But this is not so. If a person have fallen into poverty, say a lady left by the death of father or husband with limited means, or a gentleman who has failed in business, the lady is recommended to keep a school, the gentleman to take pupils, and both to write a book.’

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