I have greatly enjoyed watching the television series, The Tudors. The casting is mostly excellent, as are the settings and costumes. As long as you keep in mind that you are watching a soap opera loosely based on historical characters and events, and not a documentary or reconstruction of historical [Read more…]
Earlier this month I read this important history of the English Reformation by Ethan H. Shagan. Popular Politics and the English Reformation is a study of popular responses to the English Reformation rather than an attempt to count how many (or few) English people “really” converted to Protestantism or remained [Read more…]
I only discovered Patrick Leigh Fermor in 2006 when I read paperback editions of his two travel books, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, published by John Murray in 2004. I was intrigued to see that he was still alive at the time of publication [Read more…]
Here is the passage in the XXIst chapter of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in which Gibbon discusses Plato’s philosphy and provides an account of how Plato, grappling with the problem of “how a Being purely incorporeal could… mould with a plastic hand the rude and independent [Read more…]
I have just finished reading the most complex book that I’ve read for quite a while, Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology, by John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek and Creston Davis. According to Creston Davis, “The book examines how Paul gives us the coordinates to breakout [Read more…]
In 1938 Graham Greene travelled to Mexico to investigate the state of the country after the anti-clerical purges of the Calles government.
He travelled through the tropical states of Chiapas and Tabasco, where the repression of Catholicism had been most severe.
The experience is recorded in The Lawless Roads
I wrote this review of The Lawless Roads in 2003.
“I open my heart to myself like a sort of vitrine, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the world can know nothing.” Charles Swann, in Cities of the Plain by Marcel Proust In his fascinating book, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of [Read more…]
In January 1990, William Blacker drove from England through Eastern Europe to see what life was like in new post-Communist era. He wanted to see the painted monasteries of Moldavia, Romania. When he got there he was astonished to find “wooden peasant cottages on the edge of forests inhabited by [Read more…]
I received three excellent books for Christmas. Two of them were picked from a list of requests that I’d compiled from the LRB Christmas Books 2010 catalogue: William Blacker, Along the Enchanted Way: a Romanian Story Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes The third was a complete surprise: [Read more…]
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