Take a lucky dip in this refreshing pool of posts, randomly selected like literary Russian roulette (but more fun and much safer). Or filter by category to take a deeper dive into specific themes. Enjoy!
Argumentative authenticity
You can't help admiring people said to be as authentic as argumentative, including in themselves, and in their art and...
Language in orbit
A poet can provide the initial lift-off, but then the poem enters its own orbit and runs on its own...
The law of life
We need water for life, and life and water share a fundamental law: change. They may also share another, apparently...
Blackavized Maniots
Patrick Leigh Fermor's beautifully wrought account of his travels in Mani in Greece provides a vivid portrayal of the Maniots,...
War wounds
Listening time: 4 minutes.
Among the warm-hearted and even funny accounts of people they met in the Soviet...
Winter-defying hawk
What majesty in this triologism - a hawk thriving despite a New England winter.
'The warmest springs hardly allow me...
When does a world disappear?
When does a world disappear? When inequality goes too far.
Inequality seems much in the news these days, an apparently...
Spring cleaning your burrow
If you read Sea Room, you will fall in love with puffins, utterly endearing, quirky birds. Here Nicolson describes their...
Dark-plumed name
The name of the man Orlando will marry is ornate and rare and fully deserving to be called 'dark-plumed': Marmaduke...
Irrepressible spirits
Mrs Delany’s triumph is that she conserved her spirit despite the strait-jacket strictures of 18th century lady-training and some crushing things arrayed against...
Light-skinned Yemenite
This describes Leigh Fermor's first incursion into the Mani, after having been warned by the rest of Greece that going...
Relief of the gods
A gratitude, therefore, that the whole race or culture has not been wiped out even if the city has been...
Creased with grief
May your face, and those of people you love, never be creased into grief-maps. What a vivid image of...
Appreciation is a better mode for the understanding of achievement than are all the analytical kinds of accounting for the emergence of exceptional individuals. Appreciation may judge, but always with gratitude, and frequently with awe and wonder.
By ‘appreciation’ I mean something more than ‘adequate esteem’. Need also enters into it, in the particular sense of turning to the genius of others in order to redress a lack in oneself, or finding in genius a stimulus to one’s own powers, whatever these may emerge as being.
Source: Harold Bloom, Genius (London: Fourth Estate, 2002), p. 5
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