Laura Purcell’s The Silent Companions - a book which proves, if nothing else, that the Victorians couldn’t leave well enough alone. If it wasn’t séances or table-tipping, it was cardboard aristocrats painted to look like Aunt Mildred, propped up in drawing rooms like the world’s most unnerving IKEA mannequins. History assures us they were ‘decorative,’ … Continue reading The Wooden Shadow: Laura Purcell’s Silent Companions and the Gothic of Hollow Lives
Tag: philosophy
The Repudiators and the Inheritance of the West
“A culture of repudiation has taken hold among our elites, who will celebrate every culture but their own, and who see in the inheritance of the West not an achievement to be cherished but a crime to be atoned for.” - Sir Roger Scruton There’s something eerily biblical about Scruton’s lament. I think of the … Continue reading The Repudiators and the Inheritance of the West
The Fires That Cleanse: On Purgatory, Scripture, and the Uneasy Middle
On the back of a rotten dream and a few following unsettled nights, I dragged just about every scriptural reference book I own out, blew off the dust, and began scratching out the following. It’s heavy but it’s worth the toil. I think. The Catholic doctrine of Purgatory has always been a scandal to the … Continue reading The Fires That Cleanse: On Purgatory, Scripture, and the Uneasy Middle
The Great Grift of the Double Income
We’re told, in the dulcet tones of history textbooks and corporate diversity videos, that the ‘double income household’ was the great liberation. Women marched out of the kitchen, men learned how to boil an egg, and all was well with the world. Cue a slow-motion montage of shoulder-padded power suits, briefcases clacking like castanets, and … Continue reading The Great Grift of the Double Income
The Machine That Would Not Stop
If you want to terrify a modern reader, you needn’t bother with haunted houses, poltergeists, or even climate change. All you need to do is thrust E. M. Forster’s 1909 short story The Machine Stops under their nose and whisper: “This is you. Right now. With your Wi-Fi password tattooed on your soul.” Forster, that … Continue reading The Machine That Would Not Stop
Wording 