Culture Articles
The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford
The Good Soldier (1915) is routinely included in lists of the best novels written in English. John Dowell, its narrator, is a Quaker from an old Pennsylvania family. He is one of those unreliable narrators, far from disinterested. He is one of the four main characters in the novel – the quartet...
What the skeleton said
When alive I was male. My hips have Told you this. A warrior, a soldier. You need only see my shin, dented, Axe-marked, the whole leg mis-shapen While still in my teens. Fighting was harsh, and weapons primitive. My hands, when they held blood, damaged by war, My skin burned,...
Elisabeth Frink: A view from within
Elisabeth Frink (1930-1993) produced startling sculptures and artworks that continue to intrigue today. But what motivated her? How did she come to develop her art, and what was she trying to portray?
Friends’ Meeting House Pakefield
Too small to be called a hall a house in an overgrown garden, where old horizontal slabs hold faint names of the long dead.
I Seek a Kind Person by Julian Borger
The title of this new book is the first line of an advertisement that was placed in the tuition column of The Manchester Guardian in August 1938, by Leo and Erna Borger. The full advertisement read: ‘I Seek a kind person who will educate my Boy, aged 11. Viennese of good family....
Extract from The Convict’s Appeal
Still, surely it deserves a thought, An awful, solemn pause, Whether the Creed, by Christians taught, Can justify their laws? Which doom not death alone, but – far As human power is given, Thus place before the Almighty’s bar, Man – unprepar’d for Heaven!
Dinosaurs
It was not from the tongues of angels that came the whine of exocets intent on harm to tribesmen, comrades, friends. The deaths are classified ‘collateral’: puffs of dust across a landscape of ‘we have no option but to…’
Being Real: The apostle Paul’s hardship narratives and the stories we tell today, by Philip Plyming
Philip Plyming is the new cathedral dean up here in Durham. He is also new to publishing books: the last thing he brought out was a 2001 pamphlet called ‘Harry Potter and the Meaning of Life’. Now he is in charge of the cathedral where scenes in the boy-wizard film were...
A bypass ticket online
Failing sight, loss of hearing, Sleepless night, muddled thinking Pad for leaks, dressings for ulcers And painful feet which can’t be mended. You don’t think about getting old. It won’t happen to you, not yet. Not yet, and when it does you think That you will go...
A Friday morning in November
They lay buried in white dust for two hours A table flying from the blast settled Across their bodies as they drifted just As in a normal bed time calling them To sleep. The city burned an orange glow Warm in the night; occasional rumbles Marked the distance as in...