Arts Articles
The Journey of the Magi
It is December 1991. I am a sixth-form student enjoying my first year of A Level English Literature, delighting in a cornucopia of reading. As the Christmas holidays approach, I decide to treat myself to some wider reading and take out T S Eliot’s Ariel poems from my college library....
When poets go to war
When poets go to war, they tell a dreadful tale, They tell of crucifixion, nail on bloody nail. They tell the tale of Cain again, slaughtering his brother. They tell of orphaned children, and broken-hearted mother.
White poppies
White poppies, not red, Flowers without the blood.
War graves at Cabaret Rouge
Military beyond the last you wait in neat rows for the last trump. Orderly and regular headstones on parade you form a hollow square to look on the great stone altar where grateful nations tell you that your name will live for evermore.
Susanna’s sisters
One of my first experiences of Quakerism took place in a house full of triangular rooms in Clifton, the charming Georgian part of Bristol. The house was used as a university hall of residence. It had triangular rooms because it formed the elbow between two rows of townhouses that met...
A Meeting of Friends
We sit together in Silence let the quiet sink in settle into ourselves
What’s in a word?
Teilhard de Chardin called them ‘diminishments’ – in common parlance ‘the disabilities of old age’: stark words for what is (when all’s said and done) a natural process.
Posters for peace
The Northern Friends Peace Board is dipping into a rich archival pool to mark its centenary next year. A calendar for 2013, which draws on a selection of several hundred posters from the Board’s collection, is the first in a number of centenary initiatives. Posters were one of the main...
The Fire and the Hammer
The Fire and the Hammer is an epic work – with readers, chorus, soloists, piano and percussion – that recounts the story of young George Fox and the founding of Quakerism. It was composed by Tony Biggin and has a libretto by Alec Davison.
Memorandum of a passage to England
My beloved friend Samuel having taken a cabin For himself in the ship called Mary and Elizabeth (James Sparks the master), wept when I spake to him, I feeling a prompting in my heart to travel steerage