Reviews Articles
Moscow diary
The year 1991 was a momentous one in the Soviet Union. It led up to the resignation of president Mikhail Gorbachev and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, leaving Boris Yeltsin as president of the newly independent Russian state. Marjorie Farquharson was an Edinburgh Quaker who set up Amnesty International’s...
A negotiator’s toolkit
As floods, droughts and wildfires can neither be ignored nor rationally explained away, government departments – in every country – require ‘concise arguments for urgent climate action’.
Quakers, guns and money
When Quakers talk about their history they tend to focus on the good bits: Quakers against war, against slavery, speaking truth to power. Priya Satia’s book Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution also talks about Quaker history, but in a way which may cause discomfort...
wake
Thirty years ago Gillian Allnutt, the recipient of the 2016 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, was one of four editors of a controversial anthology: The New British Poetry. Each of the editors began their section with a foreword. Gillian Allnutt, presenting the feminist poets, offered various thoughts, including: ‘Poetry must...
Truth
The concept of truth has always fascinated me, both spiritually as a Quaker, and psychologically as a child and adolescent psychotherapist, so I was interested in how this could be explored using song and movement.
Experiencing music
It may seem curious to be reviewing a book on music and spirituality for a Quaker publication, when Quakers have a history of rejecting music (and the other arts) as an avenue to spiritual experience. Ormerod Greenwood’s Swarthmore Lecture of 1978, Signs of Life: Art and Religious Experience, brought the...
Enlightenment now
Steven Pinker’s latest book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, is an amiable, good-natured book. Reasonable optimism breaks out everywhere. The title, though, is a little misleading. It brings to mind someone like Buddha and his kind of enlightenment. It isn’t about that, itâ€...
Quakers are hilarious!
Among non-Quakers and (‘I hope so’) Quakers too, it’s widely considered to be a good thing to be able to laugh at yourself. With this idea in mind I went on a literature search to see if I could find anything which self-parodied Quakers. I was pleased to discover...
Joan Baez
On the face of it, Jeremy Paxman’s interview with Joan Baez, broadcast recently on BBC Radio 2, could have been a straightforward plug for her current, and seemingly her last, major tour and her new album (Whistle Down the Wind). But the choice of interviewer seemed interesting, almost provocative… after...
Beyond walls
It is always fascinating to hear a person tell of finding a new and more satisfying direction in life. One delight of Beyond Walls, complied by Suresh Khatri, is that you can dip into it anywhere, and read a profound experience, told in a couple of pages. In this book...