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!
Pah to the Iliad
Tom dismisses one of the world's greatest epics, a 3,000 year old classic of war, on the grounds that its heroes cannot be verified and nor did they even use...
Of no human agency or purpose
Ever had that grim feeling as you drive through some urban bleakscape?
Utility and ugliness both begin with 'u' but they don't need to be synonymous. I coined the term...
Melancholy-looking satellite
An intriguing triologism, part of an inventively astronomical metaphor to distinguish a man's head from his much larger body, so much larger as to render the head a mere 'satellite',...
Where hope begins
At first glance this posits the last place you would think to look for the beginnings of hope: where there is none.
Yet, once in a while, when despair is...
The happiest time of life
Listening time: 3 minutes. A beautiful description of the sheer, unbounded joy of being alive in a small mongrel dog who finds herself on the streets of...
Spider-thick world
Despite an occasional pathetic squeamishness, I protect insects and comfortably co-habit with spiders, and like the idea of this great old tree being thickly woven with them. I also like...
All about revolutions
Fine understatement given how many billions of human hours have been lost obliging people to listen to revolutionary speeches.
‘That is slightly the problem with revolutions. There are an awful lot of...
As lively as …
You can imagine the spark lighting up a prim Victorian drawing room, when the sexes are brought together within a confined space.
'The ladies, since the gentlemen entered, have become...
Two types of aesthetic
A pithy way to categorize an aesthetic response - the straightforward reflection of a mirror or the more complex refraction of a prism. I will test this out next time...
Shaping words and forming letters
It’s unusual to read such a detailed comment on the act of writing by hand. But once you have the paper chosen and the pen filled, it’s an absorbing motion. ...
Reading as grand occasion
This is Machiavelli and I like the way he treats reading as a majestic occasion, leaving aside his working clothes and getting rigged up in his brocaded best before diving...
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. Â
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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