Reviews Articles
Life Lines
Some things in life are just beyond our imagining. What it was like to be faced with the gas chambers and ovens of Buchenwald is, mercifully, not in our own experience and, for most of us, the nightmare belongs to past history. Yet the fact of the Holocaust, and the...
All fall down
In Sally Nicholls’ two previous books (Ways to Live Forever and Season of Secrets) the leading characters faced death, loss and terror. But both books had a lightness of touch that encouraged young readers to enjoy them, with laughter seasoning the serious issues. Her new novel has a different tone.
Deep Field
The first edition of the latest collection by our Friend Philip Gross sold out so fast that there were no copies left for the book launch and the publishers had to organise a hasty reprinting. What was it about a slim volume of modern poetry that, far from intimidating people,...
A Quaker at Sea
It is the ‘Great Depression’. Your father’s Scarborough high street business has gone bust. You are fifteen years old and must leave your Quaker school. You are offered an apprenticeship in the merchant navy, although no one in your family has a history of going to sea, and you...
Seeing animals differently
In their introduction to Living By Voices We Shall Never Hear - a collection of reflections, poems and essays - editors Pauline and Les Mitchell put the matter bluntly: for thousands of years, nonhuman animals ‘have been our unpaid, unacknowledged and, for the most part, appallingly treated slaves on whose...
The pilgrimage paradox
‘To kneel where prayer has been valid.’ This line from TS Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, quoted in the preface of Arthur Kincaid’s new book The Cradle of Quakerism, sums up the paradox that Quakers have to surmount when deciding how to commemorate and celebrate their roots. For prayer can...
Corridors of light
A while ago I heard someone on the radio use the expression ‘mental furniture’. She was referring to those comforting thoughts and ideas that come to the forefront at times of trouble, anxiety, illness or perhaps even danger. They are the thoughts that we turn to in order to give...
Black Fire
The subtitle of Black Fire is African American Quakers on Spirituality and Human Rights, though no definition of spirituality is given. I would offer: spirituality – a growing into relationship of self with deeper self; self with neighbour; self with cosmos; held together in an embrace of Spirit. What, then, would...
Magical stories
The Tear Thief, The Greatest Gift and The Barefoot Book of Mother and Daughter Tales are three recent releases by Barefoot Books.
The story of carols
The carols we love to sing, like Christmas itself, owe much to pre-Christmas midwinter rejoicings at having reached the shortest day – with the prospect of new growth and abundance to come. The many references, for example, in ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ to evergreens refer to the need to celebrate...