I wonder if anybody else in the world, except Michael Frayn and myself, remembers Gasbag’s [Mr Brady, Irish] English classes at Kingston Grammar School; he was one of the many great eccentrics there under whose spell I fell one way and another. One day, without telling us what the purpose was, he set us, for […]
Thus spake Socrates… For the past eight weeks or so I have been engaged by a very stimulating Coursera on-line course on the subject of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)—Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity. He’s a philosopher who does not warrant a mention even in the footnotes of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy—probably because […]
Early to rise… It’s 4 July 2003… Woke up this morning (4.15am) thinking, “Brackets!” Explosion of ideas got me up and at my desk in the hour before dawn which the Sufi says is an hour out of paradise.. Where did I get the notion of bracketing from? It’s long been part of my being. […]
Nothing New Under the Sun As I get older and older I notice that the same old ideas keep on circulating round the world as though they were brand new—never been thought before… A good friend of mine says that the old books contain everything you need. I agree and I have even seriously contemplated […]
‘How foolish is that business man who does not sell out and retire to a small country cottage with his little income of a pound or twenty-five shillings a week, where he could eat, sleep and read in peace and walk abroad admiring Nature. Thousands of businessmen could do this and would if they were […]
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