Culture Articles
‘I learned: Trespass’
I learned there was not always this crack guttering through the meadowlands of days, through our restless minds and bodies. I learned the welfare state once meant the right to forage hazelnuts in leaf litter, chanterelle and roots…
How You Can Save the Planet, by Hendrikus van Hensbergen
When young I read The Man who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, a visionary work from 1953. This was a decade before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, widely seen as having launched the environmental movement. I remember the exhilaration of reading about this man who quietly and single-handedly reforested his land,...
Epiphanies: Poems of liberation, exile and confinement, by Harvey Gillman
Some readers will know that Harvey Gillman, much-respected author and speaker, has always been a poet.
Changes and chances / this fleeting world
I Post-equinox, the light inside is different now. A frieze of hornbeam hedge in silhouette illuminates the dining room’s dim wall and casement astragals ascend the stairs. I read that if light could curve it would not cast shadows, gifting us this black and white, alongside uncertainty and haze....
Dear Life, by Rachel Clarke
This book may change your thinking – it has done mine. It deals with life and death and the journeys of those who are terminally ill. And yet it is about so much more than that. It is joyful, sad, funny, compassionate and above all full of love, celebrating the gift...
Parliament of fowls
Inaudible as force, a blackbird descends – she’s charred sky-chaff, (I want to say) incombustible. Winter’s bonfire’s out for this blank bird,
The Assault on Truth, by Peter Oborne
When the Truth and Integrity in Public Affairs committee was laid down by Meeting for Sufferings in 2004, it seemed the right decision. Broadly speaking, public affairs were conducted correctly by a civil service dedicated to ‘integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality’, and by politicians who, if they lied to parliament, resigned....
No Visible Injuries, by Sylvia Clare
The longer I live, the less I consider ‘growing up’ limited to childhood. This memoir by Sylvia Clare, of Isle of Wight Meeting, reminds me that the ‘growing up’ of our consciousness continues throughout life. This can happen in unexpected awakenings, when long-buried childhood shock bursts out, or in fond...
Patterns of Russia: History, culture and spaces, by Robin Milner-Gulland
This is another of those ‘personality and place’ books which are now becoming common. In this book, the place is Russia. The country is well known as a place of three cities – Kiev, Moscow and St Petersburg – but its extent is better conveyed by three ports: Archangel, Odessa, and Astrakhan...
The Life That Never Ends by Quaker Fellowship for Afterlife Studies
This is a delightful anthology of Friends’ experiences. For ease of reading, it is arranged under different headings: ‘As Death Approaches’, ‘After Death Communications’, ‘Near Death Experiences’, ‘Animals and Afterlife’, and there are also some miscellaneous experiences.