…reading the many and varied books in my ‘To Be Read’ shelves. The latest one is an edited version of Leo Tolstoy’s marvelous anti-war Sevastopol Sketches which I see I bought in 1974! All books yield up something worth recording and, apart from Tolstoy’s incisive anti-war rhetoric, this one gave me a ‘Found Haibun’. A […]
For a train journey the other day, I needed a book that would fit easily into my pocket. I decided to choose randomly from my library. Spinning around and pointing my finger, I arrived at a little book I had possessed for many years always intending to read it but never getting round to it […]
when I suddenly forgot to flap my arms sufficiently vigorously and finished up at the bottom of a flight of stairs with what turned out to be two broken ribs. They were somewhat painful. In hospital in the middle of the night, after oral morphine had settled me down a good deal, I was suddenly […]
Back in the summer of 2018, I found myself offering some guidance to my grandson who, for his A Level studies, was then in the business of making a literary comparison between The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane and Edward Thomas’ The South Country. A lovely hard-back copy of the latter had been on my […]
For some years I’ve had on my ‘To Read’ shelves a book called ‘The New Age under Orage’ by Wallace Martin (Manchester University Press 1967). I bought it because of AR Orage’s connection with Gurdjieff and thought it might throw some light on another who, like Maurice Nicoll – mentioned briefly in the book – […]
A character in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s beautiful short novel Djinn who may or may not be sometimes the author or Simon Lecoeur or nobody at all come to that from time to time, has perhaps been enrolled, or enrolled himself, in some kind of Kafkaesque non-situation only half-explained because of the need for the utmost secrecy. […]
The World is Mired …in the growth of what can justifiably be called ‘fascism’, there are starving millions, anti-human activity perpetrated by people who imagine they are human, people being blown up or killed in plane crashes and nobody asks what it’s all about; the few who sit quietly doing nothing can lose themselves in […]
