Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln between 1235 and 1253, was one of the great intellectuals of thirteenth century Europe, and is seen as one of the founders of modern science. He was a poet, preacher, translator of Aristotle, writer of instructional and theological works, and the first English intellectual to think seriously about the nature… Continue reading
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Deep State
“Stilled legendary depth:It was as deep as England” ‘Pike’, Ted Hughes The plumber’s van’s been standing since the small hours At the fishing-place beside the chartered town; Its driver has been sounding deeper waters Since he set up as the night was going down. He saw the sun come wheeling up from ocean, Watched whitening… Continue reading
Tide Watchers
At the end of a sand-heaped lane A scene from Rembrandt – Worried lights clustered against hugeness; Lowlit men appraise an upraised ocean Boiling where a beach should be. Quiet speaking on a universal plain As wind blows the buckthorn flat and The blackest of black cattle stand against stars Behind the dunes behind the… Continue reading
The Karleton Kreeper
NOTE: This is a reimagining of a medieval Lincolnshire folktale, of Sir Hugh Barde and the dragon of Castle Carlton The song of the lark was abroad in the Marsh, with March greening the tips of the willows – but in Hugh Barde’s heart it was December. He’d come out of his door in disgust,… Continue reading
Foundations of faith
The History of England’s Cathedrals Nicholas Orme, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024, pb, 306pps., US$27.95 As an amateur student of British history, my shelves creak with books about the Church in England, and the Church of England. Central in all these accounts, and unmissable in townscapes from Cornwall to Northumberland, are England’s world-renowned cathedrals… Continue reading
John Bull’s other island
Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism and the Early Modern World Jane Ohlmeyer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, 368pps., hb, $36 On 1 May 1169, thirty Anglo-Norman knights landed at Bannow strand in County Wexford, to aid the usurped Diarmait MacMurrough reclaim the throne of Leinster. There had always been interactions among the Isles, but those knights… Continue reading
What’s in a Naomi?
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World Naomi Klein, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023, hb., 399pps. Montréal-born Naomi Klein is a prominent international voice of the left, author of influential and often insightful books about capitalism and climate change. She has spent decades linking capitalism with an alphabet of other isms, from ableism… Continue reading
Starlight expression
Phænomena: Doppelmayr’s Celestial Atlas Giles Sparrow, London: Thames & Hudson, 2022, 255pp., £50 Johann Doppelmayr (1677-1750) spent most of his life in Nuremberg, but had a European reputation for his writings on astronomy and mathematics. Nuremberg had long been an intellectual and technical as well as political powerhouse, and as a young man Doppelmayr had… Continue reading
“Glorie of Spayne”
I started awake as the plane came into land. The cactuses along the edges of the runway suggested even to my stupefied senses that we were no longer in Birmingham. Distinctly un-English heat fell heavily on our heads and draped itself around our shoulders as we walked into the terminal below the giant, magic word,… Continue reading
Mountain rescue
James Hilton (1900-1954) was a bestselling novelist, responsible for Goodbye, Mr Chips and Random Harvest – and Lost Horizon (1933), the latter filmed twice, once by Frank Capra. Lost Horizon is little-read today, but is memorialised by Hilton’s place-name ‘Shangri-La’, which has passed into cliché as shorthand for any remote utopia. Tibet, with its awe-inspiring… Continue reading