Thinking between the lines of the deservedly respectful obituaries for Hilary Mantel, who died last week, a swelling impression is that she was not so much a writer of historical fiction as she was a curator and philosopher of memory. While librarians and booksellers would be happy for a descriptor that made their filing jobs […]

Shakespeare’s World is beginning to vibrate in anticipation of next year’s 400th anniversary on 8 November of the publication of the First Folio of the playwright’s (almost) Complete Works. In addition to the marking of the date itself, celebrating the appearance of one of the most consequential and famous books ever produced, the preparations for […]

When Winston Churchill was speaking, in 1939, about Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”, he was at least talking about a real place. His purpose was to acknowledge the reality of the country as being equally menacing and inscrutable and, eight decades later, those adjectives have lost none of their […]

After three dozen blogposts, we have some measure of the moral ambivalence with which the global spread of the English language has been greeted. If it weren’t for the piratical energies of the early naval “explorers” and the subsequent depredations of a ravenously expanding Empire, the summary of an earlier posting (October 2020) might have […]

It didn’t take Covid to get city-dwellers thinking about what attracted them to their city centres, and concluding that maybe home wasn’t so bad after all. The history of the last century, along with advances in communication technology over that same period, have made it ever easier for the world to be brought to the […]

Some lives reflect the mission of The Long Now Foundation, a creative thinking foundry that encourages imagination at the timescale of civilisation of the next and last 10,000 years. Individuals so rooted can make a huge impression in the here and now, but reflection enables a longer view of what shaped their past, animates their […]

Glasgow’s Climate Change event – the 26th “Conference of the Parties” that convened earlier this month to advance humanity’s response to the crisis facing our environment – has come and gone. Arising from the occasion, before and after, the consensus reaction boiled down to two key convictions: before, that it would fall significantly short of […]

It’s not often that one of our tweets is a celebration of the contemplative life. Such was the thrust – or let’s say the drift – of a Guardian editorial commenting on an English Heritage promotion of the virtues of silence. “There’s a lot to be said,” it said, “for . . . a peaceful […]

Occasionally two articles come along in the same week, ostensibly about different topics, but each prompting a similar reaction. It happened this past week with the publication a few days ago in The Guardian’s “Long Read” series of an article entitled “Built on the bodies of slaves: how Africa was erased from the history of […]

In the weeks since Cradle of English completed its first “immerzeo” – an Augmented Reality tour of a historic setting in Fleet Street – the reactions that have been the most rewarding have been those responding to the differences between modern life and what transpired “back in the day”. Not just back in the day […]