There are evenings when the world seems to exhale — slowly, like an old scholar closing a book he’s read a thousand times and loved each time a little differently. Tonight, the sun slipped behind the Pennines with the poise of a fading monarch, leaving behind a trembling rim of gold as though reluctant to … Continue reading Sunset Over the Pennines
Tag: Faith
The Legion in the Swine: A Short Sermon on Empty Souls and Borrowed Flesh
Some passages in Scripture read like thunder: sharp crack, sudden light, then a silence in which something ancient vibrates in the bones. The story of the Gadarene demoniac is one of them. A naked man shrieking among the tombs; chains snapped like wet wool; a village too afraid to bury its dead without one eye … Continue reading The Legion in the Swine: A Short Sermon on Empty Souls and Borrowed Flesh
They Flew: A Short Sermon on the Impossible
It’s one of history’s great absurdities that the Middle Ages believed human beings could fly — and one of modernity’s great dullnesses that we no longer permit them to. Carlos Eire, in his magnificent and quietly mischievous They Flew: A History of the Impossible, takes us by the hand and leads us into a world … Continue reading They Flew: A Short Sermon on the Impossible
The Queen in Two Pieces: Mary I, Embalming, and the Illusion of Dignity
I suppose I should confess at the outset that my interest in Queen Mary I’s embalming didn’t spring from some lofty academic impulse, but from years spent in the trade myself — years of sewing mouths shut, persuading stubborn limbs into positions they hadn’t attempted since the Thatcher era, and discovering that even the most … Continue reading The Queen in Two Pieces: Mary I, Embalming, and the Illusion of Dignity
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: A Morality Play for a World That Has Mislaid Its Morals
Sometimes a playwright seizes history by the throat, shakes it like a terrier with a stolen bone, and shouts: ‘Look at this — don’t you dare look away again.’ Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is one such moment: a gangster parable masquerading as a clown show, a political sermon delivered by a … Continue reading The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: A Morality Play for a World That Has Mislaid Its Morals
Wording 