Well, now than I’m back from my recent Ukraine trip, I delighted now to share the fruit of all my researches and observations. I was walking through the glories that are the streets of Lviv, in Ukraine’s western region. (It is one of my favourite cities on earth now). I had a few hours free and so wanted to visit the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum just down from Lviv’s Opera House on the grandeur that is Svobody Prospekt. Sadly, I was to be disappointed. Or perhaps I just couldn’t find the door. Hey ho. But I did strike gold. Before I can explain why, I must backtrack somewhat.

Do you remember that notorious art restoration from Spain?

A small parish church, in the NE town of Borja, was home to a fairly standard fresco of Jesus crowned with thorns: the Ecce Homo. It was competently painted by Elías García Martínez in 1930, but images of its kind are two-a-penny in Spanish Catholic Churches. It certainly wasn’t the kind of thing to draw crowds. It wasn’t even (as Samuel Johnson famously said of Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway) worth seeing but not worth going to see.

Enter, stage left, one 81-year-old Cecilia Giménez in 2012. She lived locally and was distressed by the fresco’s deterioration. She volunteered her services to the local priest and these apparently were gratefully received. There was a small catch. She had no training or experience with such things. And the result became known the world over.

What made this so perfect is that this fresco then became a tourist attraction in its own right. People flocked to see this masterpiece. Brilliant.

But I think people have been too harsh on dear Cecilia. The prevailing view is that she was unschooled and unskilled and that her restoration was a disaster.

Which is where my Lviv encounter comes in. Because I actually believe I have found her inspiration. Which proves far greater degrees of intentionality, insight and historical awareness than previously credited. I’ve no idea what this thing was that I encountered. There wasn’t any information. But I'm fairly convinced in my own mind. So I will just leave this… object… here for you to judge for yourselves.

QED

Sacred Treasure

• The Missing Temenos?! Graham Tomlin on a possible (probable) reason why the world feels out of joint.

• Listening to the Church In Ukraine: Voices from a Country at War (latest Vista edition #49)

• Harvey Kwiyani is characterstically on point and sobering in reflections on British Kenya: What is Mission Without Paternalism?

• Alan Jacobs has had a nightmare with OUP over the publication of his new Spiritual Lives biography of Dorothy L Sayers - and so now won’t publicise it at all.

• The Martyn Lloyd-Jones trust has updated its website with lots of different resources.

• Andrew writes very movingly here about death and grief.

• Malcolm Guite reclaims Halloween in verse.

Topical Treasure

• George Pitcher is devastatingly blunt: Christa Pike and the end of the American Alibi

• Ed West’s fascinating overview of the life of Singapore’s extraordinary leader, Lee Kuan Yew.

• Local Wiki: I just love this brilliant idea. Plug in a location and it gathers Wikis for everything within a 1 mile radius or so.

Quirky Treasure

• You want a concise articulation of the difference between the English and the Germans? Voilà! Although it perhaps to lose its acuity in the 20th C.

• Jam Cary on the Most Famous English Battle You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of.

• As one with East Anglian roots, this is rather marvellous: photos from 1886 of the life on the Norfolk Broads.

It reminded me of something Dick Lucas said in passing 32 years (🤯😮) ago on the Cornhill course. He was remarking on how hard it was to write successfully for tabloid papers because they were required to have a limited vocabulary, needed not only to grab attention but also to sustain it, and get the key points across succinctly. The more one has to write, the clearer the challenge to achieve all of that becomes. It also demands a probably unhealthy appreciation for bad puns, but that’s a different matter.

Anyway, Dick suggested preachers should make a serious study of the genre (even if the content is rarely very edifying!). So my friend and I started text-sparring with possible headlines of our own. I thought it might be fun to get something going on here too.

But before I do, I was slightly disappointed to discover that it’s been attempted before by Nick Page with his Tabloid Bible! But the blurb here says it’s for pre-school reception, so perhaps it is different… Though I've not read any of it to find out.

So here goes a start (most will be quite niche to UK readers!)…

Genesis: Turn to page 3 for something tempting

Judges: Delilah gives her side: What I learned on Vidal Sassoon course!

1 Samuel: David v Goliath: GOTCHA!

Psalter: Keep Psalm And Carry On

Hosea: Prophet is 3-time Winner of Worst Child Names of the Year

Daniel: Meshach, Shadrach, & Abędnego: Phew! What a Scorcha!

Babylonian Exile: Last One In Jerusalem Turn Out The Lights

Revelation: Cult Leader Tells All About Bad Trips (here we go again, after mentors Ezekiel, Daniel)

Can you think of any others?

While here, I’ve spent a day based with UBTS (the Lviv baptist seminary) doing various things, including a Pastors’ breakfast for local leaders. I got chatting to a lovely bloke, Tymofii, before it got going and heard a bit of his story. Since the full-scale invasion he and his family had been refugees twice - since they come from the east, close to the 2 regions that have been occupied by Russia. They moved a few districts westwards initially, but then as the occupation took hold, they had to move again; this time to Lviv in the far west of the country. But then he suddenly said he had a present for me. I was taken aback since we’d never met. However, it was a good punt because it had been announced that I was also giving a lecture on CS Lewis’s Learning in Wartime (his 1939 sermon included in The Weight of Glory). This is material I’d given in Kyiv about 18 months which then led to a CT article. So the gift was not a complete bolt from the blue. But still…

It was a copy (he said he already had another one) of CS Lewis’s THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE in Russian, from its original Soviet edition, published in Leningrad in 1975. WOW!

Some Classic 1970s Illustrations

Leafing through, I rather love the slightly wild palette of bright oranges and blues (which I couldn’t really capture with just my phone), as well as the jolly monochrome drawings which are so immediately identifiable.

It was translated by one G. Ostrovskaya (of whom I can discover nothing), but I was intrigued by the illustrator: G. A. V. Traugot (of whom I’ve had some success here and also here). It seems there was quite a community of remarkable book illustrators in Leningrad from the 1930s onwards.

G.A.V. is the collective initial of the Russian artistic trio: Georgy Traugot (1903-1961) and his two sons Alexandr (born 1931) and Valery (1936-2009). Traugots have illustrated more than 200 books since 1950’s and are amongst most celebrated Russian artists. Having survived World War II and the siege of Leningrad, Alexandr Traugot now lives in Paris and is still actively engaged in art making and illustrating. His work is highly sought after by collectors and publishers.

That, in itself, is interesting. But what was truly fascinating was the preface, presumably by the translator or perhaps a publishing house higher-up. (Incidentally, not being a Russian speaker, I can’t easily search to figure out whether the publisher’s name is Detskaya Literatura or it’s merely describing the genre—it literally means children’s literature.)

An Almost Laughable Modernist Agenda

This is the google translate take on this preface (above right):

I’ve highlighted several bits that really stood out. It really is a little window into its time: the Soviet Union mid-1970s, very much the tail-end of the Brezhnev era, epitomising the gerontocratic decline of the system. And yet, the fall of the Berlin Wall would have seemed inconceivable at this point. Communism was here to stay… So look what the preface says:

• ‘not difficult to discern…’: white witch = fascism!! Oh I see… OK, then. And fascists hate those who help the weak and the downtrodden (which is indeeda fair point).

• how does evil (aka ‘fascism’) get defeated? ONLY by people of good will and selflessness… (ie good, selfless servants of the people, then)!

But look what’s missing!

• Lewis has written a ‘fairy-tale’, the first of several. But from what Tym told me, and after a quick search, the publishers never followed this with the Narnia books. More significantly, we’re only told he wrote science-fiction (an excellent Soviet genre). No mention of any of his scholarly work, nor inevitably of his prolific theological and apologetic writing. That would never do in the USSR.

• The White Witch’s evil is described in exclusively elemental terms—seasons, nature, the sun, joy, life— and by inference that means Aslan because he was light-bringing and sun-drenched. But there is nothing metaphysical or transcendent about Aslan here. For it would never do to raise one’s head beyond the closed universe since that’s simply not possible. So that would never do in the USSR either.

• How does one defeat her? Well simple - have integrity and purity and band together. Not a hint of the 4 children’s flaws and weaknesses that result in them refusing to believe poor Lucy after she first goes through the wardrobe, getting picked off via Turkish Delight, and generally falling out. Even more significantly, not a hint of anything sacrificial and miraculous in Aslan himself, nor the fact that it is only through him that the witch can be defeated (not the Pevensies’ selfless solidarity!). And that would absolutely never ever do in the USSR.

Just amazing. For sure, it’s a very brief introduction to the book, and it’s not intended to be a full précis. But that makes it all the more interesting to see what the writer does decide to include. Evidently, the bosses decided that this was a great story and thus worthy of translating. By avoiding mentioning the bigger picture of Lewis’s purpose, worldview and passions, they hope that such things will remain obscure.

And this is how it was for some…

After my lecture this evening, I had some fascinating conversations with folks. One with a couple perhaps in their late 40s was astonishing. The husband had asked a question in the session about George Macdonald’s Lilith (of all things) and its relationship to Lewis and the Inklings. Well that was unexpected in itself! But both of them adored Macdonald’s writing in all his weirdness because (in the wife’s words) they contained ‘so much pain and love.’ And then they brought up Narnia.

They had both loved the books (encountering them first as adults), but had never fully grasped what they were all about at a deeper level despite being Christian believers for some years.. It took them several read-throughs for the penny slowly to drop. But their son—who started them aged 10 quite recently—got it almost immediately. ‘Aslan’s JESUS isn’t he!?’

Such is the power of stories to grip, perplex and inspire. And sometimes bring to faith. So who knows how many across the vast sweep of the Soviet empire can look back on the first seeds of Christian faith being sown by this extraordinary translation? To that end, I rather love the suggestive inscription in biro on the inside front endpaper:

What a gift.

1. Franz Schubert's ERLKÖNIG (1815)

We begin with a song, but one that is over 200 years old and in German. Franz Schubert (1787-1828, above right, painted by Wilhelm August Rieder in 1875) blazed bright but far too briefly. He died at only 31 and yet left an extraordinary body of work.

This song, Erlkönig, was a setting of a poem by Goethe (1749-1832, painted by Joseph Karl Stieler in 1828, above left) which Schubert composed at only 18. (That really is not fair, is it?) The poem reflects the great obsessions of the burgeoning movements of Romanticism, with its resistance to reductionistic materialism, a love for the sublime and the grandeur of the natural world, fascination with human passions, as well as the threshold with the metaphysical. This is all captured in this short poem, with the drama’s different characters reflecting different perspectives.

That is the key to Schubert’s setting. The song is propelled by its constant rhythmic foundation on the piano, and the beautiful melody weaves its way through the poem’s eight verses. But the huge challenge for both pianist and singer (in under 3-4 minutes) is to differentiate between the Father, the boy, the wraithlike, demonic Erl-king, and narrator (a scene painted by many artists including this detail above of a mural by Peschel in Dresden). Not only that, but the tensions are ratcheted up by Schubert’s device of going up a semitone in each new verse. 

This brilliant musical miniature is a remarkable achievement: dramatic, chilling, shocking. It perfectly illustrates how something created on the smallest scale can transport one into vast emotional landscapes.

2. Kei Miller's AUGUSTOWN (2016)

To Joel’s home country of Jamaica now, and a prize-winning novel by Kei Miller, an old friend of his (as it happens). Augustown is a district of the capital, Kingston, and in Miller’s deft handling, it becomes a microcosm of both Jamaica’s life and complex history.

The story traces the devastating but unintended consequences of authoritarian action:

• firstly with the real-life treatment in the 1920s of the revivalist preacher Alexander Bedward by the colonial government after he claimed to his many followers that he could fly.

• then in the 1980s, the cruel, unsanctioned haircut of a Rastafarian boy by his officious school-teacher.

Never didactic or simplistic, Miller is always sensitive to the complexities of the situation and the tragedies that follow. He gives one such a sense of place, so that even if one has never visited this district, let alone the Caribbean, the book feels totally alive, with scores of compelling characters that seem to have both agency and inevitability.

The book is truly a fine achievement and deserves wide readership.

Oh a yes, Rastamouse was a thing (thanks Sophie). British cartoon with (believe it or not) 104 episodes!! They even did a set at Glastonbury in 2011.

3. Egon Schiele's FOUR TREES (1917)

Back to Vienna again, but a century later. In fact, we only just noticed after completing the recording the lovely symmetry of masterpiece dates: 1815, 2016, 1917!! It really is by chance. If ever we needed to illustrate the fact that extraordinary things can be made by difficult, even despicable, people, then this is it.

Egon Schiele (1890-1918, photo taken in 1914 and self-portrait painted 1912) was a profoundly disturbed artist who was contemporary with Gustav Klimt and strongly influenced by him (among others). But the dysfunctions of his upbringing, plus the darkness (and at times illegalities) of his proclivities, make him a very difficult subject. But there’s no doubting his artistic genius. As Sophie pointed out, for those who only know his visceral and shocking portraits, this landscape comes as a welcome surprise and relief.

His FOUR TREES has an autumnal melancholy to it (it was painted only a year before he and his wife would die three days apart of the Spanish Flu) contains multitudes, as is so often the case in artistic evocations of the four seasons.

It’s not straightforwardly figurative but conveys some unease. Why are they such different shapes, and isolated all in a row, and why has the second already lost most of its leaves?

And yet, for all its weirdness, it is utterly compelling. It’s hard to tear one’s eyes away once you start looking closely.

Other Mentions

Triptych highlights after two series:

• Sophie: Joel likening Nick Cave’s Ghosteen to William Shatner’s ‘singing’ on his Christmas album… (1:5).

• Joel: Sophie describing her childhood being reared by R S Thomas and Lionel Ritchie in the Welsh valleys (1:1).

• Mark: Sophie’s subsequent childhood memory of avoiding the juvenile games of fellow school kids through her immersion in the work of Lord Byron.

I’m neither historian, sociologist nor philosopher. So I feel particularly out of my depth. This is a list of books that have struck me between the eyeballs. It is not exhaustive and experts will identify the big gaps.

5 Books: Immersed in Big Ideas

• Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) by Viktor E. Frankl: let’s start with the most important. Such a crucial but breathtaking book, and like the works of Primo Levi, it is a serious meditation on what is possible after the ovens of the Holocaust. His perceptions on who in the camps survived forces us to put ourselves in their shoes.

• A Rumor of Angels (1970) by Peter L. Berger: Berger was the first to help me realise that the scientific materialists who appeared to hold sway over the 20th Century might not as watertight as they seemed. This book burst through the canopy of the closed universe and felt like such a relief!

• The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984) by Jean-François Lyotard: Probably the densest and heaviest book of the whole list but Lyotard helped me begin to grasp the tectonic shifts in thinking, explaining why people are so suspicious of the grand stories (or metanarratives as the posh bods call them).

• A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living (2011) by Luc Ferry: a philosopher and former Minister of Education in the French Government, this is a brilliantly accessible overview. The most surprising aspects are, firstly, his inclusion of Christianity as a philosophical step (while explicitly accepting that it is not a philosophy per se) and secondly, his recognition that it is the most attractive proposition despite his atheistic conviction that it is false. Fascinating.

• The Twilight of the American Enlightenment (2014) by George M. Marsden: A random inclusion perhaps, but it is one of the most compelling works of cultural history I've read. His contention is that the USA (and West generally) really changed in the 1950s and NOT the 1960s (as everyone assumes). His explanations are startling but utterly compelling. Eye-popping.

5 Books: Why do they vote them in?!

• The Prince (1532) by Niccolò Machiavelli: The oldest on the list. Controversial but brilliant: a distillation of how to wield raw power, Machiavelli provides a chilling grid for assessing the realpolitik challenges of sustaining a grip on power.

• Politics and the English Language (1946) by George Orwell: One of the great essays of the last century. A short read, this, but one I find myself returning to frequently. It is a great first stop in trying to parse politicians’ speech. Watch out for clichéd metaphors and unnecessary complexity.

• The Power of the Powerless (1978) by Václav Havel: Nobody had a clue at the time he would become Czechoslovakia’s first post-Communist President - the playwright wrote this essay at great cost, but it is a brilliant assessment of the capacity of people to operate in a totalitarian state (despite what the authorities let them believe). Inspiring.

• The Hitler Myth (2001) by Ian Kershaw: I’ve written about this book here before. Kershaw is a renowned historian of Nazi Germany, having written a mammoth 2-volume Hitler biography. Here he compares what people believed about Hitler with what was actually true - and the chasm is breathtaking. Stunning evidence for the effectiveness of propaganda. Be warned.

• Nothing is True & Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia (2014) by Peter Pomerantsev: Taking the propaganda point forward, this brings things right up to date with an insider view of how Television makes controlling a country of 11 time zones(!) possible. A brilliant book.

5 Books: The Social Effects

• The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (2007) by Philip Zimbardo: Zimbardo is infamous for the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment. When the atrocities of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison were exposed, Zimbardo felt compelled to revisit the dark chapter of his Stanford research because he saw grim parallels. An important if controversial insight into how social pressure affects people.

• Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Shaped Modern History (2010) by David Aaronovitch: one of my favourite books of the last 20 years. Aaronovitch goes through the 20 big conspiracy theories of the time and tries to draw threads and pathologies. More than any other, this made me even less of a conspiracist than I was.

• Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything (2011) by F. S. Michaels: Not sure why I picked this up - but it made so much sense of our society. And the monoculture she exposes? Economics. It’s hard to refute that judgments, moral dilemmas and government policy decisions tend to be reduced almost exclusively to the economic. Once seen, hard to miss.

• Get Real: How to Tell It Like It is in a World of Illusions (2013) by Eliane Glaser: Glaser is a literature scholar, radio producer and writer and even though things have developed almost unrecognisably in the last 13 years, this is still a very useful foundation for getting a purchase on solidity.

• Self-Made: Creating our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians (2023) by Tara Isabella Burton: A stunning read, I was torn between this and Burton’s earlier book, Strange Rites. It’s so good to read stuff by people who can make unexpected connections to point to bigger stories.

5 Books: The Air We Breathe

• Amusing Ourselves To Death (1985) by Neil Postman: A classic analysis of the impact on television on all areas of modern life from politics to religion. Some have challenged his negativity, but to read him 40 years on is to recognise how prescient he was. Remarkable.

• Modern Culture (2000) by Roger Scruton: the late Sir Roger was fairly iconic as a scourge of woolly thinking especially on the left. In this book he makes an impassioned appeal for so-called high art in the face of dumbing down to lowest common denominator pulp. A great advocate for having to work at art, because accessibility really shouldn’t be the only criterion for what works. Polemical and stimulating.

• Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times (2000) by David Lyon: David Lyon is a British sociologist who has worked and taught in Canada for years, and is a superb guide to the cultural shifts we are facing. I didn’t understand it all, but think I grasped enough to see what he’s on about. It is hard not to recognise so much of what he identified 26 years ago as becoming mainstream in today’s streaming world. And he is much more sympathetic to a premodern worldview than one might expect in such a book…

• Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007) by Clive James: the late great Clive James was a polymath and yet also hilarious. An accomplished poet, a brilliant TV host, memoirist and commentator. This is a book to dip into - a collection of 100+ essays which engage with pretty much anything. He’s as good in providing entrées into classic works of art as he is in the bon mot and passing comment. Brilliant.

• Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies (2nd ed, 2021) by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre: I picked this up on spec, knowing nothing about Chandler McEntyre but loved this book. She’s a poet and poets love words by definition: their hallmark is precision and forethought. Loved this book.

5 Books: Stories To Inhabit the Vortex

• Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley: Neil Postman famously asked if Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s was the more likely dystopia. In a media-saturated society it’s hard to deny that Huxley was onto something. A brilliant novel.

• The Plague (1947) by Albert Camus: He’s perhaps more famous for L’Étranger (The Outsider) but this novel is even greater. Camus is easily my favourite of the mid-century French existentialists. He seemed to have a deep intellectual integrity. This is a stunning story about an Algerian town dealing with a deadly outbreak that provokes its quarantine. The various responses to the predicament are telling, challenging and provocative. A masterpiece.

• Foucault’s Pendulum (2001) by Umberto Eco: The great novel about some scholars who decide to create a fake conspiracy theories but then scramble to figure what to do when it gets believed and spreads. But that’s just the surface of this riveting and fiendishly plotted book. But couldn’t help but be reminded of it when reading Phil Tinline’s recent, scary history The Ghosts of Iron Mountain.

• Arcadia (1993) by Tom Stoppard: My favourite play written in my lifetime and perhaps of all plays. It’s not too ‘clever-clever’ as some accuse Stoppard of being - it’s just sparklingly inventive and emotionally compelling. A play about ideas that moves as much as it stimulates. What do we really know about anything, in the end?

• Atomised (2001) by Michel Houellebecq: this is NOT for the faint-hearted and I'm slightly reluctant to include this. Houellebecq’s subject matter and obsessions are pretty stomach-turning. But he’s nothing if unafraid to tackle taboos in an almost prophetic way. Set in his native France, he pushes reality to what it really is in a godless, lawless, lost world. The allure of the 60s’ sexual and political freedom has last all its sheen by the time you work out its consequences. And Houellebecq is rigorous in doing just that.

So there it is. As I said, it is not exhaustive, nor even a list of all the best in their fields. But these books stick in my mind as those that have most affected me as I've tried to navigate it all. What might you add/subtract?

Sacred Treasure

• When Tolkien refused to work with a Nazi-leaning publisher.

• Since AI is the topic du jour (de l’an?), here are a few recent, good takes on it:

  • Reliable as ever Phil the Simple Pastor rounds up a bunch of responses

  • Andrew Roycroft on Treasuring the Process.

  • The Culturist weighs cons AND pros here (some of which is $)

  • Iain McGilchrist on AI vs the Human Soul (Unherd, £)

  • Helen Lewis gathers some pundits who know about this stuff from the inside, one of which is:

  • M. F. Robbins on The AI Apocalypse is Extremely Boring Now

• With the death of Wendell Berry announced on August 31st, here are a few tributes and appreciations:

  • How Wendell Berry saved my life by Patrick Deneen, a political science professor at Notre Dame.

  • Jake Meador on what he taught him about faith, love and marriage.

  • Paul Kingsnorth over at First Things writes of Wendell Berry’s Eternal Story

  • Instead of his own reflections, Ted Gioia shares Berry’s Nine Standards for Technological Innovation

• Tim Challies on why so many fallen pastors don’t walk away (HT Simple Pastor)

• Malcolm Guite explains why he’s crafting an Arthuriad for our age.

Topical Treasure

• Why do some people feel like life is so unfair?

• What are the odds of living to old age at any place or time in human history: Remarkable: Any Human Ever.

• Churchill gave important instructions about brevity and clarity in reports and other documents in 1940 and again in 1951. But I fear we’ve gone too far these days…

• NATO is much in the news: its future is debated, its existence contested, and yet its membership is enlarged. This helpful map opens up what it actually gets up to.

Quirky Treasure

• Another Photography round up:

  • 50 years of Steve McCurry’s iconic photos (above)

  • Gordon Parks captures segregationist America (below)

  • Winners of the 2026 Minimalist Photography Awards

  • Brick Lane and Spitalfields in 1980s London by Clive Murphy

  • Riding the Last tube home in 1990s London by Mark McEvoy

• Blindness is no constraint for some: the remarkable Derek Rabelo, Professional Surfer

• This is v cool: a global Movie Scene Map - find out where different scenes were filmed.

The Masterpieces

1. Wendell Berry's DO NOT BE ASHAMED (1967)

We had to rerecord this episode for several reasons (without changing the masterpieces), but this gave it added poignancy. The great farmer-poet Wendell Berry died in the intervening weeks (31st Aug 2026) at the age of 92 and so it was all the more special to focus on this poem, DO NOT BE ASHAMED.

It’s one of the hundreds that he published over his long, intentionally non-transient life. But the fact of his total commitment to living in one place throughout (Port Royal, Kentucky) gives this remarkable poem even greater force since in many ways it articulates the worst sides of small-town life. It gives permission, if not a mandate, to break free from the psychological bonds that high-control communities exploit to keep their subjects in step.

2. Alexander Abraham's STAY (2019)

The backstory to this song is fascinating. Alexander Abraham was born to Nigerian parents in Athens, Greece, but the whole family moved to the USA when he was just 11. But he faced more significant setbacks in the States. His mother was killed in a car crash resulting in his being fostered, and then as a talented football (ie proper, NOT American football) player, a serious injury  ended his career.

But during his convalescence, he started teaching himself guitar. Which is, of course, not necessarily going to result in much at all. But in Alexander’s case, it led to him starting a career in music. Who knows what might happen if injury ever prevents him from playing music?

We had some discussion as to exactly what he’s wrestling with in the song Stay. Why the sense of guilt (in the first stanza), where do the loyalties lie? But it does seem (though you can make up your own mind) that he’s wrestling between the roots he’s put down in Texas and the fun and excitement of London’s music scene. It’s a beautifully measured performance, and Joel particularly loves the guitar solo by Gary Clark Jr in this clip below.

3. 1917 (dir. by Sam Mendes, 2019)

Sam Mendes has a pretty impressive cinematic (let alone theatrical) track record. But 1917 may well go down as his masterpiece (unless his Beatles quartet is incredible…). Inspired by the stories told by his Trinidadian grandfather Alfred Mendes (who had fought in the First World War), the entire war is distilled into a 24 hour period in which we experience the constant jeopardy, futility and horror of the frontline.

Two British Lance-corporals (Schofield and Blake) are ordered to undertake a do-or-die mission to warn the 2nd Battalion Devonshires that if they proceed with the planned dawn attack on the next morning, they will walk into a trap and be massacred (because the Germans have only made a tactical retreat). It is the ultimate Quest story, and it certainly packs a punch. The cinematography is spectacular, the cast top-notch, and the cinematic immersion complete. It is an astonishing achievement.

I became quite obsessed with the film when it first came out, and ended up writing it up for The Rabbit Room here. It was the cyclical nature of the narrative that really got under my skin, so much so that I tried to map it out here.

Other Mentions

Screen Adaptations we have loved

• Sophie: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (the BBC / Colin Firth one)

• Joel: Arthur Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (the modern one with Cumberbatch and Freeman)

• Mark: Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels (Apple TV with Gary Oldman etc)

The last time I made one of these QCombos was way back in 2019; I’ve no idea why I stopped, but I thought it might be fun to start up again. (You can find the rest here on Flickr.)

BREATHING LIGHT by James Turrell (1943- , USA)

If you’ve been following Triptych, we actually discussed another of Turrell’s installations recently (in episode 2:6). I’m fascinated by his mastery of space and light, which results in the immersion in something other worldly and yet often tranquil or transporting.

Find out more here.

JAPANESE MAPLE by Clive James (1939-2019, Australia)

I vividly remember being floored by this poem when I first read it in The New Yorker in 2014. James had been such an TV icon during my adolescence and beyond, and his appearances were unmissable in our household. Hilarious, acute, insightful, fearless about subject matter. And here he was writing about his imminent death. I’d had no idea.

In the end, he lived for another five years (thanks to remarkable medications). But this prepared for the end - albeit one without hope as was consistent with his committed atheism. It’s a poignant attempt to make the best of it, and one cannot help but agree with his wonder at the world’s vibrant but fleeting colours.

Two Potential Enemies

In theory, these questions have straightforward answers. Of course not. And yet that is simply naive in the real world of competing narratives, ideologies and credentials. But just when the current conflicts in the world seemed impossible to quell, The Future Is Peace, a book by a Muslim Palestinian and Jewish Israeli, has left me speechless. Because these do seem necessary sadly, here are their credentials in suffering:

• Maoz Inon is the grandson of Jewish immigrants during the British mandate who helped to found the secular, socialist kibbutz in which both Maoz and his father were born. However, as things turned out, this kibbutz was situated just a kilometre or two from what became the Gaza border. Both Maoz’s parents were killed on Oct 7th, as were many lifelong friends.

• Aziz Abu Sarah is a Muslim Palestinian whose family goes back many generations. When Aziz was just 7, his older brother Tayseer (who in many ways functioned as a surrogate parent and protector) was arrested by the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces), subsequently badly beaten and tortured, and then soon after his release died of his internal injuries. For years, Aziz was gripped by rage and the desperation for revenge. Things only began to change as an 18-year old he decided to learn Hebrew (having despised the language) and experienced a simple act of kindness from his teacher, a Jewish Israeli woman.

Agreeing on terms

Both men have been involved in creating so-called Dual Narrative Tourism in the region. Despite having met only once before Oct 7, it was Aziz’s simple text message of condolence to Maoz that resulted in a profound friendship and a form of pilgrimage in the territory that became this book’s focus. I could not put it down, reading it in just a couple of days. It is profoundly affecting.

Both had to listen. Both had to learn. And remarkably, both have learned to laugh together (Aziz’s sense of humour is infectious, as is clear in the Jon Stewart conversation below) and both have learned to love. But theirs is no limp or platitudinous conflict-aversion. There can be no partnership if the disagreements or fury are muffled. Each needs the space, let alone permission, to speak as they see it and they accept that they will not always agree. When injustice occurs, whoever the perpetrator or victim, it needs calling out. That is the truth-telling on which peace-building fundamentally depends. Yet, as Aziz says (and repeats to Jon Stewart),

anger is like nuclear power; it can bring destruction or make light.

For example, if there is to be any conceivable hope for Russia-Ukraine reconciliation, there will need, at the very minimum, radical and honest truth telling, as well as the willingness to hear the grounds for victims’ anger. But that’s an aside, for now. Back to the issue in question.

They were invited to converse publicly at TED (merely days after Maoz lost his parents—please do watch the video below). Aziz writes:

Before our TED Talk, Maoz had said to me, When we tell our stories, let’s make sure we use the same words. If you say your brother was murdered, I’ll say my parents were murdered. If you say killed, I’ll say killed. There is power in our personal narratives, and Maoz understood that there should be equality even in the language we use to tell our stories. We both understand that true equality isn’t possible now, as the reality around us makes it unattainable. But acknowledging this, and working to change it, is essential tor genuine peacemaking. (p46)

The Land of Dual Narratives

If one debate gets to the heart of where the disagreements lie—the two extremes of the spectrum—it is of course the meaning of 1948 and what gets summarised here by Maoz (note his readiness to also quote a Palestinian perspective without qualification, an agreed principle by both writers throughout the book):

Palestinians see Zionism as a destructive force; the Palestinian author and literary critic Edward Said described it as, an uncompromisingly exclusionary, discriminatory, colonialist praxis.” But for many Jews, including my grandparents, Zionism was originally about saving lives. As former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir once said, “There is no Zionism except the rescue of Jews.” (p50)

• For Jews, 1948 meant a grasp at existential survival post-Holocaust. They flocked from all over the world to what was (in the Zionist narrative) a ‘a land with no people, for a people without a land’ (p16). It felt like the last chance saloon after 6 million had been murdered.

• For Palestinians, 1948 meant the nakba (the catastrophe). A year later, more than 80% of those who had lived within the newly-formed borders of the State of Israel had gone: they’d fled to refugee camps or to cities or had lost lives. Countless homes and settlements were razed. That left 150,000. They were given citizenship but under tough restrictions; there are now roughly 2 million Palestinian Israeli citizens: so still 20%.

One of the most moving moments in the book comes from Aziz’ father’s first experience of a peace meeting that his son is hosting. I won’t spoil it here because he tells the story so well in both videos clipped. But the profound awkwardness of the moment leads to a breakthrough in all kinds of ways for people on both sides.

It does prompt the recognition of an undergirding fear that many must face when getting involved in such work. Might acknowledging another’s pain marginalise, or perhaps even invalidate, my own? Here is Aziz remembering how hard it was for him pluck up the courage to visit the Yad Yashem (the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem) because, for example, the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre was not memorialised.

There is no memorial to commemorate Deir Yassin, no Museum of the Nakba in Israel for the Palestinians who were murdered in 1948. Palestinians are denied the privilege of publicly memorializing our own traumatic history. For a moment, I considered turning around and going home. A part of me feared that if I empathized with the “enemy,” it would be a betrayal of my own pain.

…

Many Palestinians fear that acknowledging the horror of the Holocaust is tantamount to excusing the Nakba and the occupation of our land. They have a fear of acknowledging any Jewish pain at all, regardless of whether it was caused by Nazis or by Palestinians. It’s the same for Jewish Israelis who don’t know the history of the Nakba. They fear that if they acknowledge Palestinians’ suffering, it will absolve Hamas of its horrific deeds. But this mindset keeps us trapped in endless violence. How will we ever learn how the other side thinks and feels if we do not try to understand each other’s painful histories? (p200)

I am astonished by that paragraph. I cannot even begin to imagine how hard it must be to have written it, quite apart from how much antagonism and incomprehension it must generate from either side. But that is what this book is like throughout.

Needless to say, this is a must-read. We all know about a world where victims are driven to become perpetrators and thus create a whole set of new victims. Ad infinitum. But how different the world would be, could be, should be, if we all had the courage to learn from Aziz & Maoz.

I’ll close with two (of the several) poems quoted in the book. Intriguingly, both are Irishmen, one from the north, one south. Stop was explicitly provoked by the 2014 war in Gaza:" ‘with the staccato-like urgency of a telegram, Gorman imagines a bereaved Palestinian parent speaking to an Israeli.’ (p68) The other reflects on the effects of Ireland’s ‘Troubles’.

That is quite the surprise when one considers the proportion of human beings, quick or dead, who have never taken issue with his existence or intervention. Perhaps some writers are shifting in their willingness to accept this as a fact of life, especially when casting imagination’s eye to a bygone era, rather than using their narratives as an excuse for back-projecting modern scepticism (thinking of C. J. Sansom’s otherwise brilliant Shardlake Tudor mysteries).

Warning! This is a personal, flawed and hardly exhaustive list. Some will note lack of Russian masters. That’s simple: I find them intimidating. Then there’s the fact that the groupings into 5 are fairly arbitrary. I also break my 1 book per author rule for this 25 (Graham Greene warrants at least 5 entries IMHO). And I can already think of about 12.6 books that should also be here. And I've not even mentioned Francis Spufford… Oh well. Here goes…

5 Books: Stories set in bygone ages

• William Golding’s THE SPIRE (1964): The first of this 25’s Nobel Laureates. Golding is best known for The Lord of the Flies which is very theological too. But this account of ecclesiastical ambition and hubris during the mediaeval construction of an English cathedral is gripping.

• Frederick Buechner’s GODRIC (1980): Nominated for the Pulitzer, and the subject of a recent Triptych, Buechner’s mediaeval hermit is vividly relatable in his crippling guilt and self-hatred, despite the outlandish extremes of his life, and, more to the point, despite the Bishop of Durham’s relentless goal of making him a saint via the hapless monk Reginald.

• George Mackay Brown’s MAGNUS (1973): written after the Orcadian writer became a Catholic about the Orkney king, martyr and saint, Magnus Erlendsson. This is a vivid but alien world, full of perplexing and provocative imagery; not least through the entirely unexpected flash-forward towards the end to Flossenburg Prison in 1945 where Dietrich Bonhoeffer would be executed. Strange, a little bewildering, but profoundly affecting.

• Shusako Endo’s SILENCE (1969): this is the book that perhaps prompted Endo’s soubriquet, Japan’s Graham Greene. Greene was undoubtedly a promoter of his writing, and of this book in particular. Narrating the fate of several Portuguese Jesuit missionaries to 17thC Japan, this grapples with the hardest theological questions of all: divine silence in the face of the most acute (and, indeed, maliciously inventive) suffering of his people. One of the most searing books I've ever read - and yet, even here, we see the glimmers of the dawn’s light. But only just… Astonishing. (Scorsese’s recent cinematic version is pretty epic, too).

• Victoria Mackenzie’s FOR THY GREAT PAIN (2023): just picked this up randomly in a bookshop because of its quirky title. First time writer Victoria MacKenzie has written a beguiling and insightful novel about the 1413 meeting of two historical: Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Both suffered greatly the incomprehension and scorn of their contemporary, very male world, but both were resolute in their convictions and vision. Beautifully imagined.

5 Books: Scepticism and Scorn for Faith

I did say the groupings were arbitrary. But because they have characters or themes that generally represent scepticism, I've bunged them all in here.

• Voltaire’s CANDIDE (1759): the arch-sceptic himself, Voltaire’s Candide is a classic, dripping with an 18thC satirist’s biting scorn. I was rather bamboozled by it when it was one of my A Level French set texts, but it wormed its brilliance into me. It’s cunning and powerful; and the hypocrisy and platitudinous beliefs about suffering that he exposes are certainly worthy of his attacks. But in the end Voltaire’s reason isn’t quite as reasonable as him might have thought. But that could just be me…

• Graham Greene’s THE END OF THE AFFAIR (1951): this is one of the greatest novels ever written in my view. I’ve come back to it several times; it is just so dazzlingly unsettling. Maurice Bendrix is nearly killed in a V1 rocket attack on his flat. Sarah, his lover, prays a brain-twister of a prayer in a desperate bargain with God - and so finds herself having to comply when it is apparently answered. The consequences are devastating, not least for Bendrix’s wellbeing. Just superb writing.

• Albert Camus’s THE OUTSIDER (1942): no answered prayers in this one, though. Nothing in the world appears to affect the French Algerian Meursault, including the death of his mother in a retirement home. He gets embroiled in a group of fairly unsavoury characters, ends up having to defend himself against a knife-wielding relative but this results in firing a gun at him four times. After his arrest and death sentence, the prison chaplain infuriates him with his absurd religion, prompting the retort that our death renders everything meaningless anyway. Camus is at his honest best here.

• Thornton Wilder’s THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY (1927): Suffering is also the catalyst here, as a Peruvian priest tries to find rhyme or reason why the individuals might have died when an Andean footbridge collapsed in 1714. In some ways it reflects the precisely questions put to Jesus in Luke 13. It’s not hard to see why this won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize, since it’s a spare and compelling invention. Very powerful.

• Umberto Eco’s THE NAME OF THE ROSE (1983): I read this around the time the movie with Sean Connery and a very young Christian Slater came out. And instantly became an Eco addict. I rarely grasped what his novels were always on about, but I could never stop reading. This book is everything you could possibly want in a historical novel - setting, characters, mystery, alien obsessions and weird goings on, plus a brilliant detective monk intentionally called William of Baskerville in allusion to the master of reason Eco was inspired by. But Eco’s scepticism is on display since the truth, à l’Occam, is far more mundane than the monks dare believe.

5 Books: Capturing Doubts ’n All

• Graham Greene’s THE POWER AND THE GLORY (1951): OK — he’s here for the 2nd time. But this is my favourite Greene. The anonymous whisky priest is a superb creation, on the run in 1930s Mexico most communistic state. In fact, he’s the last priest alive. And by his own admission, he’s the most unworthy and flawed priest, an alcoholic and father of a young daughter. And yet, it is precisely because of his flaws that he is the character that is most human and most full of grace of perhaps any that flow from Greene’s abundant imagination.

• Walker Percy’s THE MOVIEGOER (1961): Walker Percy would go on to write more after this debut (I was very struck by The Thanatos Syndrome), but this made his name and introduced many themes (existentialism was a major interest to this Southern Catholic convert). The rather comically (for this Brit) named Binx Bolling is a troubled veteran, desperately searching for meaning and purpose in New Orleans, with a difficult family background and a string of failed relationships. It is powerful and poignant.

• Iris Murdoch’s THE SEA, THE SEA (1978): I have not always found Murdoch easy, perhaps because I lack her rich philosophical background. But this is an extraordinary novel about a famous actor-manager who’s retired to the coast where he meets and becomes obsessed with his first love. A piercing exploration of the unreality of our fantasies and assumptions about other people. A compelling story of broken idols.

• Douglas Coupland’s GIRLFRIEND IN A COMA (1998): Very different style now, and more popular, but no less piercing for that. Taking a cue from The Smiths’ song, the main character went into a coma when hanging out with some other Vancouver school friends, and doesn’t wake up 17 years. Life has moved on - but the world is also about to end! Which means the book is a multilayered, part-dystopia, part-coming of age, part-postmodern youth culture depiction. Coupland is always at his best when trying to figure out what makes people and, the culture they inhabit, tick.

• A. G. Mojtabai’s THIRST (2021): Can’t for the life of me remember why I picked this up. But it’s a remarkable novella by a writer I'd never heard of. A sceptical woman is called to help at her dying brother’s bedside, thus dredging up all kinds of family history, old resentments and personal confusion. Because her biggest challenge is that her brother has been a Catholic priest for most of his working life. Very moving indeed.

5 Books: Faith amidst all the Flaws

• Fydor Dostoyevsky’s THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV (1879): I said I was scared of the big Russian novels and this is no exception. But it is undoubtedly epic and brilliant, I grant you that. The roguish Fyodor has three sons (or is it four?) from two marriages and they are raised apart. But where there’s a will, there’s a family and the age-old problem of the inheritance is a key catalyst. I’m not even going to attempt a plot summary - but it does repay working at. Wow.

• Flannery O’Connor’s WISE BLOOD (1968): By another Southern Catholic, this is O’Connor’s masterpiece and is full of grotesques and sinners, with characters dissembling and deluding til the cows come home. But it is still full of great humanity despite the religious fraudsters that is so characteristic of (but hardly unique to) American protestantism. Unforgettable.

• Alan Paton’s AH, BUT YOUR LAND IS BEAUTIFUL (1983): You’ll no doubt know of his celebrated Cry The Beloved Country, a superb depiction of life in apartheid South Africa. But this later novel is my personal favourite of his. Set just as the grim apartheid mechanism of the 1950s Pass Laws came into force. Paton was an activist against the National Party’s regime and the novel is inspired by the period in which he was Liberal Party president. I’ve never forgotten the scene where a Supreme Court judge attends a black church for their Maundy Thursday service of communion and foot-washing.

• Marilyn Robinson’s GILEAD (2004): It’s not everybody’s cup of tea because it is undoubtedly a slow burn. But who could have predicted that a fictitious autobiography of a dying 1950s pastor (for his 7 year old son who would never really know him) would become such a global blockbuster. But it did, in part because of its beautiful writing and deep humanity. I have at least one friend who went into ordained ministry in part because of it.

• Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s LOVE DIVINE (2025): A surprise, this one; recently published by Slightly Foxed (of whose quarterly magazine I'm an avid subscriber), I was a little bemused as I got into this. It seemed a rather niche and quaint tale of folks in various orbits around a Home Counties Anglican parish during its interregnum between vicars. But it builds into a convincing and empathetic novel that I found deeply affecting.

5 Books: Windows into wider culture(s)

• Naguib Mahfouz’s CHILDREN OF THE ALLEY (1959): A Palestinian friend recommended this unusual novel, by the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, and I'm so grateful to have read it. A fatwa was put out after its 2nd English translation, and Mahfouz was attacked as a result. It is a shifting and subversive novel (aka Children of Gebelawi), and it took me a while to figure out what was going on. But through the lens of life in one Egyptian alley over several generations, Mahfouz loosely weaves the story of the 3 Abrahamic religions, against the constant threat of dictatorship and power-brokers.

• Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451 (1953): A classic dystopia about book-burning as social control, which also has featured on Triptych. It feels more relevant than ever, of course, as screen based brainrot threatens to destroy people’s cognitive ability and independence—which is precisely what has happened to several in the book. But isn’t it striking how often the living libraries (those who memorise texts to keep them in circulation) carry within them whole books of the Bible as well as Shakespeare and other classics?

• P. D. James’ THE CHILDREN OF MEN (1993): PD James was taking a break from her normal sleuthing with Adam Dalgliesh (I nearly included one of those here — her Original Sin (1994) is especially good) and I was utterly transfixed when it first came out.. The film adaptation is a true classic (even as it changes some key plot elements), but this vivid dystopia is a fascinating thought experiment. Set after a global pandemic of infertility, the human race essential waits for death. James is masterly at depicting the effect on a world without a future to speak. Until suddenly, a woman becomes pregnant…

• Samantha Harvey’s ORBITAL (2023): 6 astronauts live in the International Space Station, and this novel depicts 24 hours in which they orbit the earth 16 times (each orbit takes 90 minutes). This is fiction set in space, as opposed to science fiction, as it were, and the result is a beautiful meditation on the beauty of the cosmos, common humanity and the questions of God, life and meaning. Wow.

• Leif Enger’s I CHEERFULLY REFUSE (2024): Finally, another Triptych title, this time by the American novelist Leif Enger. Another dystopia, but without the clarity of a cause or even obvious consequences narrated; instead people in America’s Great Lakes muddle through life as people always have; but the key to the resilience of the recently bereaved protagonist is a refusal to give into despair. There is hope through beauty, through connections with others and through perseverance.

Sacred Treasure

• Very sad to hear that Wendell Berry has died at 92. What an extraordinary life well lived and written. Here is one tribute (of thousands, no doubt) from The Rabbit Room with his poem How To Be a Poet.

• And while we’re at the Rabbit Room, Ally Gordon writes on The Trouble With Beauty

• A wonder, from Art & Theology: “Seraphim” (2026) choreographed by Lindsey Hanson:

Topical Treasure

• Ted Gioia has acute insight: 10 Brutally Honest Predictions on the Future of AI

• Timothy Snyder is a voice for our times: 20thC historian and now embarked on a 10-lecture series on Hitler and Stalin Today.

• I had no idea that the great actor Sarah Bernhardt was also an accomplished sculptor. Then saw this. A grandmother with a just drowned grandson. Just Wow! The pathos of uncomprehending grief captured in marble. Pics and comment by Victoria Emily Jones.

• If you think the cult show Severence is entirely fictitious, then check out these portraits of US Office life in the 1990s.

Quirky Treasure

• The Culturist is consistently intriguing and provocative. Here the group offers:

  • 4 levels of Reading: how to read deeply

  • 5 great books you can read in a day.

• Love these Book Maps (HT Simple Pastor)

  • Retrace routes taken in books of all kinds in Reading Maps

  • Find books from a place or theme at Which Book?

• Love these pics: Rural Scottish Post Offices in the 1970s They don’t make ‘em like they used to (gutting)

• Where and when Lunar Eclipses have taken place for millennia!

• Marvellous actor, comic and writer Cariad Lloyd dives deep into BBC costume drama adaptations (scored out of bonnets)

• Not only have we lost Wendell Berry, but a few days before him, we lost Dolly. Here she charms a pub in County Kerry while on holiday in Ireland.

You’re welcome.

5 Books: All time favourites

• 1066 and All That by Sellar & Yeatman (1930): the first of its kind and never bettered, a long-time favourite of my grandfather’s. The original anti-history history text book (aeons before Horrible Histories and replete with exams ordering candidates ‘to write on both sides of the paper at once’ etc), this is the perfect summary of British history right up until the point where “America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a .” That beats Fukuyama hands down.

• Tragically I was an only Twin: the Complete Peter Cook (2003): a compilation of his writing over a lifetime of ingenious bawdy whimsy and absurdity. The one-legged Tarzan sketch was written when only 18 - but the humour just poured out of him.

• The Complete Yes Prime Minister by Lynn & Jay (1993): a bit of a spin-off this from the pair’s original TV series of Yes Minister and Yes PM. The likes of Hawthorne, Eddington and Fowlds so inhabited the parts that it is a joy to read these literary adaptations. Political satire NEVER bettered.

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979): Adams started this with John Lloyd as a radio play but he was the one to make it soar astronomically into an unprecedented trilogy in 5 parts. Such sidesplittingly effortless invention (or so it seemed) but with occasionally serious purpose. Just wow.

• Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene (1958): Greene is in my top 3 writers - his novels split between serious books and entertainments (of which this very much the latter). A brilliant take-down of the self-importance of British global power and its intelligence services, set in Cuba over a decade before it really was the setting of a nuclear confrontation.

5 Books: Comedy Classics

• Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749): I was introduced to this by the sublimely funny 1963 film with Albert Finney and was no disappointed. What a brilliant, pacey romp through 18thC English society. Who can ever forget the households of Allworthy or Western, especially the likes of Rev Thwackum or Mr Blifil. One of the real greats.

• The Diary of a Nobody by the Grossmiths (1892): we’re now in suburban London (although Holloway hardly feels like that these days). the brothers George and Weedon (weird name) Grossmith created their character bank clerk Charles Pooter for Punch Magazine and this diary accounts for 15 months of his absurdly self-important life and vexations. Just marvellous.

• Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932): ashamed to say I'm new to this (we discussed it in a Triptych episode) but it is now a firm favourite. Precociously young but opinionated and mildly terrifying Flora Poste descends on the fixed certainties of an English farming family and sorts everyone out. Promising material? In Stella Gibbons, it’s pure gold.

• Right Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse (1934): the problem with Wodehouse is that he could quite easily have occupied all 25 slots on this list. And that’s just the Jeeves stories. I’ve tried to restrict authors to one mention each. But Wodehouse is the perfect antidote to all that is wrong in the world, as is his Jeeves. If only he offered his services to all and sundry. This book chosen for the sheer wonder of witnessing an inebriated Gussie Fink-Nottle giving out the prizes at Brinkley Court school.

• Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938): a simple case of mistaken identity—two journalists on the books by the name of Boot—results in William Boot, the most hopelessly unqualified man ever to be sent into a war zone, going instead of John Courtney Boot. But Lord Copper is pleased with his decisiveness and Boot (William) is tossed about on the fortunes of war. A perfect novel and IMHO Waugh’s best (closely followed perhaps by Decline and Fall).

5 Books: Hilarious Fiction

• The Tin Men by Michael Frayn (1965): Frayn is another whose titles could feature several times here. He’s still going in his 90s and is unfailingly hilarious. So here’s his debut novel, a wonderful take down of the British boffin world of PM Harold Wilson’s era of the ‘white heat of technology’ as the team nervously await an official visit from HM The Queen.

• A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving (1990): two school friends and their lives in the US East Coast. They’re not especially impressive of heroic - and yet there’s something about Owen Meany that John Wheelwright can never forget. This is such a surprising novel that touches on big issues of faith and determinism and hope while never losing its wonderful capacity of laugh-out-loud funnies.

• What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe (2014): a biting postmodern satire of the Thatcherite 1980s but it’s never heavy-handed or preachy. It contains all the ingredients of farce and evokes the old Carry-On films (the title comes from the 1961 Carry-on style film with Sid James and Kenneth Connor), while exposing deep fissures in contemporary society. A work of genius.

• Under the Frog by Tibor Fischer (2002): the author is a Brit born to Hungarian parents who fled the Soviet clampdown in 1956, and this novel fictionalises their experiences in a darkly comic way. A brilliant expose of the absurdities of totalitarianism but sustained by real joie de vivre.

• Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov (2002): Kurkov is a recent favourite writer - try to get everything he writes (especially now, after Russia’s insane invasion of his native Ukraine). This is set in the madness around the collapse of the USSR in which proto-oligarchs are dividing and conquering and our hapless protagonist finds himself given charge of a penguin when the Kyiv zoo is forced to shut down.

5 Books: You can’t believe it’s NOT Fiction.

• Never Have Your Dog Stuffed by Alan Alda (2005): This is sage advice from the actor who made his name in MASH and latterly The West Wing. An extraordinary life told in admirable self-deprecation and wit. Just loved it.

• Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson (1995): Bryson has created an entire genre with this sublime, midlife retracing of his arrival in Britain as a penniless American student. He delights in the paradoxes and oddities of the country in which he subsequently spent most of his life. Unputdownable.

• Bossypants by Tina Fey (2014): I loved this even though I was not hugely familiar with her work (apart from 30 Rock). She’s got a brilliant turn of phrase and has worked with everybody in the business. Takes no prisoners, though. As the title might lead one to believe!

• Round Ireland with a Fridge by Tony Hawks (1998): I made the mistake of reading this during a weekend when I did my back in and had to spend most of it lying on the floor. But I couldn’t help it. Once begun, couldn’t stop. An idle pub bet results in the comedian having to hitchhike the circumference of Ireland with, um, a fridge. Will he succeed? Only one way to find out.

• Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (2016): the South African comedy phenomenon is a megastar, but the person who shines in this book is his incredible mother! I don’t think I'll ever forget Trevor’s account of being dragged round the various churches she was part of each Sunday in her clapped out VW Beetle. So great. Or who could fail to be charmed by his Soweto dance troupe’s visit to a posh Jewish girls’ school in Johannesburg? Quite a lot of people, as it happens!

5 Books: In a League of Their Own

• Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson (1990): OK I said I don’t like to include authors more than once on these lists. But I feel it’s ok if they’re in different genres. And this is Bryson’s popular history of the English language. And you would not believe how funny it can be… until you read this. And his chapter on English surnames is out of this world.

• Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss (2003): And now for a book about English grammar; or to be more precise, punctuation. But never has the Oxford comma incited greater mirth or quirks of meaning been more entertaining. It’s a MUST.

• The Meaning of Liff by Adams & Lloyd (1983): the 2nd rule breaker of the list; Douglas Adams again, this time in a collaboration with John Lloyd that actually lasted. The premise was simple: there are all kinds of experiences for which there are no words. So they use meaningless placenames. At last we can now define aboynes, glasgows, belpers and bodmins.

• Molvanîa by Cliaruo, Gleisner & Sitch (2003): travel books (esp. those catering for student budges like The Rough Guides) are asking for lampooning and this Australian trio nailed it. Leading the unwary to ‘the land that dentistry forgot’, this ‘Jetlag Guide’ to the fake post-soviet state advises on life in the capital, Lutnblaag, and the like. Politically incorrect probably, but still fun as it mocks the travellers prejudices more than those they visit. Perhaps.

• The Timewaster Letters by Robin Cooper (2005): if you are in the habit of ranting against inbox spam and snail mail directmail then this is the book for you. Robin Cooper (aka comedian Robert Popper) gets his own back by engaging in extended correspondence with the customer relations departments of various organisations and corporations. Just for the hell of it. And the result is eye-wateringly funny as hapless employees get dragged deeper and deeper into pits of bureaucratic horror.

The Masterpieces

1. Midnight Mass (Mike Flannagan, 2021)

Midnight Mass is a 7-part Netflix series that came out in 2021, created by horror aficionado Mike Flanagan. Which, for many of us is not exactly the greatest selling point. But bear with this, since there was method in Sophie’s madness for suggesting we watch this. For the purposes of the episode, we focused just on the first two episodes: Genesis & Psalms (click image right for full list of intriguing episode titles).

A remote island, cut off by weather and failed ferries to the mainland, is the setting, a small community that revolves (for better or worse) around the island’s Catholic Church. This has beeb led by the elderly priest, Monsignor Pruitt, for years, but he is away on sick leave. The compelling but somewhat mysterious Father Paul stands in his place.

This is a beautifully depicted community. But the most striking thing about the whole conception, as we discussed in the pod, is that none of it feels clichéd.

2. Green Mountain Falls Skyspace (James Turrell, 2022)

James Turrell (1943– , USA) is a brilliant American artist who works with light. Green Mountain Falls is a remote town in Colorado and Turrell’s SKYSPACE was installed there in 2022 as part of a local arts project.

The principle is very simple. A windowless cube of a room, with seating up against each of the four walls up in the mountains. But in the roof, there is a retractable door. Beyond that, only sky. Within the cube, sophisticated lighting can transform the atmosphere at the touch of a programmable button.

Find out more here.

3. Who Are We Fooling (Brooke Fraser with Aqualung, 2010)

Brooke Fraser (1983- ) is a singer fr

om New Zealand and, for years, was associated with Hillsong Worship. But she has built a successful global career in her own right. The song Who Are We Fooling? is taken from her Flags album from 2010 and was written with the British singer Aqualung (aka Matt Hales).

As Joel notes in our conversation, the song is unusual in being a genuine duet, rather than just a tune sung together. This is a musical dialogue that cuts right to the heart in the most affecting way.

Here is a live version with a different singer, TEEKS, and the Auckland Philharmonia from 2024.

Other Mentions

Opening Gambit: Fave Pop Culture Moments

• Sophie: John Travolta’s 

• Joel:

• Mark:

I don’t think I can remember a time of not doubting stuff. Is that weird? Perhaps. But it’s not really been something I’m able to prevent. Like breathing. There’s also perhaps been a sub-tectonic strain of cynicism within me that, if anything, has grown over the years not diminished.

So my challenge has not been one of IF but HOW.

On August Thursdays, our church in Maidenhead has a series of random talks, and I was asked to offer some thoughts on this. It was actually helpful for me to do it, especially because of some clarifying questions during the Q&A.

So here it is:

In case useful, here’s the handout:

Stmm Handling Doubt (jul 2026)

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And a link to the Os Guinness book I found especially helpful, later published under the title God In The Dark.

1. President Putin’s Christian Framing

2. Patriarch Kirill’s Christian Framing

3. The Ironies of Ukraine’s History

4. Nabokov’s Prophetic Insight

1. President Putin’s Christian Framing

When Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 (in fury at the Ukrainian people-power rejection of his puppet President Yanukovich in the Euro-Maidan protests), he deliberately makes grand historical justifications. Despite decrying Ukraine as an artificial country He cites NATO expansion as a provocation (but then one just as to ask why other countries would want to join) and the need to denazify Ukraine (and yes, there is a far right elements in parts of the Ukraine military—as there is more or less everywhere, including Russia). How ironic then that Ukraine is led by a Russian-speaking Jewish president from Ukraine’s east, one who lost many family members in the Holocaust? But more than that…

• Putin explicitly invokes the Kyivan Rus leader Vladimir the Great, said to have been baptized on the peninsula in the 10th century and converted the medieval Slavic state to Orthodox Christianity—at which point, Moscow did not even exist. It is, of course, ‘obvious’ that Kyiv must return to Russia (despite the fact that the opposite conclusion could early be drawn). But for those who know and love Russian history, this move apparently makes complete sense.

• Incidentally, according to the article just linked, a poll in Russia conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation, found that just 25 percent of Russians surveyed were able to recall that the conversion of Kievan Rus to Christianity took place under Vladimir the Great. So he’s clearly really important to people.

The invasion began in Feb 2022. There are many points before and since at which Putin outlined his casus belli. But two are significant here. Later that year, in September, Putin gave a speech to herald the signing of the Donetsk and Lugansk accession treaties into Russia.

• These regions have joined Russia on the basis of citizens’ right to choose who governs them (and, of course, they’re desperate to secede from Ukraine ). But what about the rest of Ukraine. He’s discussed the historical grounds for this on many occasions: it’s definitely worth listening to the Rest is History episodes on the Vikings in the East (to learn both why he claims this and why it really doesn’t hold up). But that’s not the only justification.

• In this speech, he gets all theological. The invasion is necessary because

  Ukraine is being lured away from the Russian sphere (Russkiy Mir) by the conspiring western countries. Representative of this evil influence is the pervasive confusion about sexuality, gender, parenthood. So he declares that this influence must be resisted:

Let me repeat that the dictatorship of the Western elites targets all societies, including the citizens of Western countries themselves. This is a challenge to all. This complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, and the suppression of freedom are coming to resemble a “religion in reverse” – pure Satanism. Exposing false messiahs, Jesus Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” These poisonous fruits are already obvious to people, and not only in our country but also in all countries, including many people in the West itself.

He cites the presence across Europe and N. America of like-minded people who are equally concerned about these seismic cultural shifts (he’s not wrong about this, of course). His point, though, is that the only hope for the world is push back, territory by territory, and that means preventing Ukraine becoming even more westernised. Which is why invasion is the ONLY course, completing what he began in 2014 in Crimea. How grimly ironic to draw on the Sermon on the Mount at this point, do you not think?

But Putin’s rhetoric doesn’t even come close to what his pet Patriarch, Kirill, has said.

2. Patriarch Kirill’s Christian Framing

6 March 2022: Just days after the invasion began, on Forgiveness Sunday (of all days), Patriarch Kirill preached in Moscow’s Cathedral of the Holy Saviour (in translation here).

• As far as he is concerned, the invasion just days before is quite explicitly linked to, and partly justified by, Gay Pride.

For eight years there have been attempts to destroy what exists in the Donbass. And in the Donbass there is rejection, a fundamental rejection of the so-called values ​​that are offered today by those who claim world power. Today there is a test for the loyalty to this new world order, a kind of pass to that “happy” world, the world of excess consumption, the world of false “freedom.” Do you know what this test is? The test is very simple and at the same time terrible—it is the Gay Pride parade. The demands on many to hold a gay parade are a test of their loyalty to the new world order; and we know that if people or countries reject these demands, then they do not enter into that world order, they become strangers to it.

• Now, there are many things one might say quite legitimately about such events; for example, the domineering cultures of the likes of Stonewall UK have been exposed and resisted recently (for example, at the BBC itself). But at the very least, in a democracy, one can disagree with what a pride march represents or promotes at the same time as accepting its right to take place.

• To suggest that this is why Donbas’ Russian speakers would secede is bizarre. But apparently, they have suffered for eight years because of this desire and thus Putin’s ‘special military operation’ was designed to rescue them. Even though it is now well known that the Donbas resistance was a classic false flag operation with the notorious ‘little green men’.

But a full-blown theologising comes 2 years later (at a point that we now realise was not even half-way through the war). In a decree from the World Russian People’s Council (chaired by Kirill) on 27 March 2024 (entitled The Present and Future of the Russian World), it is stated that:

special military operation is a Holy War, in which Russia and its people are defending the single spiritual space of Holy Russia, [against] the West, which has fallen into Satanism.

In previous statements, Kirill declared that death on the battlefield in Ukraine washes away all sins and that Russia opposes the Antichrist and global evil. Naturally others in the ROC (Russian Orthodox Church) echo such views. And when the invasion commenced, the patriarch ordered that the Prayer for Holy Rus for victory in the war should be mandatory in all church services. In this prayer the war is presented as a fight for the survival of the so-called All-Russian nation. In his mind, as this article says, he sees this as a zero-sum game.

The WCC (World Council of Churches) was, in its rather feeble way, quite unimpressed. Which is something, I suppose. But neither this, nor countless other protests, have made the slightest difference. According to catholic scholar George Weigel, the patriarch has doubled down on his heretical position in a recent book in which he claims this ‘war as a salvific action: a duty to God and a Russian service to a corrupt world’ ($).

Such are my briefest of forays gleaned from cursory Google searches. I confess to not really having the stomach for much more. But there’s no doubt that some regard this conflict as a holy war, and even crusade, that’s being waged against the Satanist West in its humanist secularism that casts of all constraints from common sense and tradition. Ukraine just happens to be the flash point. You can just feel the waves of pity emanating from the Kremlin as night after night Kyiv and other cities are bombarded.

But what really gets me is that Christians in the west who certainly have a few thoughts about culture wars and church decline are swallowing the lines from both president and patriarch whole.

The Ironies of Ukraine’s History

(i) Ukrainian persecutors?

Something that gets picked up from time to time is the subject of religious freedom in Ukraine. It’s a hot button issue for the right, and for good reason. It IS a problem all over the world, and it’s rarely the kind of thing flagged by human rights activists. Organisations like CSW and Release International do vital but often thankless work. But the case is occasionally made that President Zelenskyy is, in Tucker Carlson’s words, ‘a persecutor of Christians’ because of its suppression of the ROC within Ukraine. Far from being legitimate, it actually bears the classic propaganda hallmarks to exploit an existing grievance or concern in the west for anti-Ukrainian purposes.

At stake is the status of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP, formed around the country’s independence in early 1990s). This is inevitably complex and there is much that I don’t understand. But during wartime, all sides tend to exploit whatever means they have to gain the upper hand. As I understand it, there is little doubt that the Kremlin uses the ROC for its own ends, and because UOC-MP is affiliated to Moscow, it’s not hard to see why it has been regarded, and used, as a fifth column. This is in part what led to the historic schism when the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) broke away in 2018/19. Christianity is not proscribed in Ukraine. Nor is Orthodoxy. But the UOC-MP is problematic at the very least. No wonder there have been legal consequences, as this fairly recent research paper by Mark Elliot, the eminent church historian of the region, investigates.

However, it should be clear by now that the UOC-MP is a unique case. No other religious organisation or denomination has been affected by this kind of legislation. So the suggestion that there is religious oppression in Ukraine is frankly absurd, as is the claim that there is no free speech.

For all its problems with corruption, agitation and extremists, they are nothing compared to those of Russia where even carrying blank pieces of paper in a protest can lead to imprisonment. What amazes me about corruption in Ukraine, is not that there is a lot of it (which there is) but that it is still actively and successfully hunted down, despite cases coming desperately close to the presidency. Even during wartime. Can you see that happening in Moscow? Or for that matter in Washington DC?

(ii) Ukrainian humanists?

The roots of Christianity in the Slavic world is traditionally traced to the Baptism of Rus in Kyiv in AD998, which is why Kyiv’s Pechersk-Lavra has been such an icon of Ukrainian and Slavic Christian identity. So what’s going on with Putin’s bombing of it? If this really is a holy war, it’s a very peculiar way of going about it.

Furthermore, during the USSR era, Ukraine was an outlier.

• As far as Orthodox believers were concerned, c50% of all ROC parishes across the entire Soviet Union were in Ukraine. And in fact, 25% of all USSR ROC parishes were found in just 4 Ukrainian oblasts (counties)!

• What about Protestants? Ukraine actually had a reputation for being the country’s ‘bible belt’. The USSR’s Baptist church had 1.5 million registered members; over half lived in Ukraine. That made it the largest Baptist community in Europe!

• Then there is the anomaly of the Ukraine Greek Catholic Church, found predominantly in western Ukraine around Lviv and other hubs (the reason, if you’ve ever watched major Vatican ceremonies like conclaves or papal installations, why a bunch of cardinals wear orthodox-looking kit). In the Soviet era after western Ukraine was annexed by Stalin (it had been part of Poland), the UGCC was prohibited. (You can see more about the ban at the Lviv Sobor/Synod here) Prior to that, it had 3.6 million members in nearly 2400 parishes across the region. The church then had to exist underground for the next four decades or so.

How darkly ironic then that Moscow deigns to invade, bomb, and brutalise Kyiv in the name of a holy war when Ukraine was far more ‘Christian’ than Russia (however that might be quantified)?

Nabokov’s Prophetic Insight

I’ll close with an extraordinary paragraph that I read only this afternoon. It comes from an important but chilling book by Russian investigative journalist Andrei Kolesnikov, titled The Closing of the Russian Mind.

The eclectic essence of this ideology, which has been reproduced at various stages of Russia’s historical development, was described astutely by the writer Vladimir Nabokov in the short story “Conversation Piece, 1945,” published in The New Yorker in June of that year. In it, a former White Army colonel - an immigrant living in America - says:

The great Russian people has waked up and my country is again a great country. We had three great leaders. We had Ivan, whom his enemies called Terrible, then we had Peter the Great, and now we have Joseph Stalin. I am a White Russian and have served in the Imperial Guards, but also I am a Russian patriot and a Russian Christian. Today, in every word that comes out of Russia, I feel the power, I feel the splendor of old Mother Russia. She is again a country of soldiers, religion, and true Slavs.

This was an exceptionally precise observation by Nabokov, who abhorred such an ideological combination. Soldiers, religion, and true Slavs: nothing has changed in decades. A militarized empire that considers itself sacred and sanctified by God, blinded by the most vulgar nationalism... (Closing of the Russian Mind, p67)

And still it continues. And still the missiles, drones and bombs continue to fall on a beautiful and inspiring country (destroying thousands of lives and hundreds of religious sites). Make it stop.

Kyrie Eleison

1. Leif Enger's I CHEERFULLY REFUSE (2025)

We start with a very up-to-date masterpiece this time: Leif Enger’s 2025 novel I Cheerfully Refuse. Enger is perhaps not so well known on this side of the Atlantic, but he deserves to be. His writing is lyrical and evocative, and the world he creates for this novel is fascinating. It falls within the genre of dystopia but it wears that lightly. For example, we never discover the nature of the cataclysm that transforms the world, only that it has occurred at some unspecified moment prior to the story. The fact that Enger wrote it during the Covid lockdowns (a bit like Amor Towles’ A Gentleman In Moscow) is not incidental, however!

Set in the Great Lakes of North America, Enger’s characters wrestle with the challenges of this new environment, struggling to create a sense of order and community against the odds, while constantly trying to preserve their humanity. Recently widowed when his beloved wife Lark dies, Rainy befriends Sol, a young tearaway who joins him on his Orpheus-like journey.

Despite coming from an essentially Christian foundation, the book is far too well-written and brilliantly conceived to descend into crude tub-thumping. Instead it is a moving and ultimately hope-filled testimony to reslience and wonder (not a million miles away from Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven).

For more, listen to the conversation Russell Moore had with Leif Enger soon after the book came out – it’s full of fascinating and intriguing insights into the book and its meanings.

2. J. M. W. Turner's THE FIGHTING TEMERAIRE (1838)

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was one of Britain’s greatest painters and of all his myriad works, The Fighting Temeraire is perhaps his most beloved. In polls purporting to identify Britain’s greatest/favourite/best (etc) painting, this frequently comes out on top (whatever that means). It is certainly one of the main attractions in the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square.

This is a painting about transition, about the end of one era overlapping with the commencement of a new one. It depicts the final journey of the Temeraire (which had seen glorious service at the Battle of Trafalgar itself), as the ship is towed from Sheerness in Kent along the river Thames to Rotherhithe in south-east London, where it was to be scrapped. For various reasons, this painting is an impossibility, a fiction to portray a greater truth. But it is one of those paintings that mesmerises the viewer, because the more you look, the more you see. Turner adored painting grand landscapes (in the manner of Claude) with the gorgeous wide colour-spectrum so characteristic of dawn and sunset. But it is no accident that this moment of high nostalgia is bathed in a pre-dusk light.

It is unsurprising then that this image means so much to a nation prone to nostalgia about past, so-called glories! And therefore, it was the perfect setting to a James Bond reaching the end of his usefulness…

3. U2's 3 Songs from NO LINE ON THE HORIZON (2009)

It was only a matter of time. U2 had to make it onto Triptych at some point, for reasons that regulars to my blog will know all too well. I’m only hoping that you were all impressed by my self-restraint in holding it back to this stage in the second season.

Instead of taking one song, or one album, we’re doing something a little unorthodox but there is actually method in the madness. And no, this is NOT the album U2 foolishly gave away to the world for free if they had an iPod or iPhone or whatever it was at the time. That was definitely a misfire.

This album is the one before that one, and came out in 2009. It’s quite hard to pin down as a whole, but after the opening title track, it does seem to be formed of three little groupings. And this is the first set. They are the most explicitly theological of the album’s tracks, and they each do intriguing things. You can go into a lot more depth if you wish by reading this longer engagement that I wrote some years’ back.

U2's Nloth Let Me In The Sound Full

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But for now, read the lyrics and listen to the episode!

Other Mentions: 3 'Slappable' Characters!

• Joel: Yoda from the Star Wars franchise

• Sophie: Uriah Heep from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield 

• Mark: Kenneth Widmerpool from Antony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (esp when played by Simon Russell-Beale)

I don’t quite know what to do with myself now. Of course, I have no illusions about its future, recognising how few novels actually come within spitting distance of a publisher let alone a bookshop, so we’ll see. If I put anything else about it here, it’ll be about lessons from the process more than anything else.

So I thought I'd just mention here how it all began. After all, writing a novel set within a very specific timeframe during the Cold War — we’re in East Berlin between February 1968 and some time in the middle of 1969 — is hardly my natural habitat. I don’t speak German, have only visited the country a handful of times, and have never lived in a communist society. But such impediments never stopped the likes of Mary Renault from inhabiting in Ancient Greece, Iain Pears in Restoration Oxford, or in colonial New York (or any others I've mentioned).

It all began with of a bit of graffiti.

The walls belong to the State library, and stands just a block or two away from Friedrichstrasse Station and its infamous Palace of Tears. In August 1968, 2 students had scrawled the name of the new Czechoslovak leader, Alexander Dubček. For this they were imprisoned and thereafter struggled with state-backed harassment right until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

This triggered a whole bunch of random thoughts. In particular, I was very struck by the thought that people throughout the Warsaw pact countries had been watching Czech events with bated breath since Dubček kicked off the Prague Spring. What was Moscow going to do? When the tanks finally went in, the world looked on in horror… including the citizens of East Germany.

That got me pondering about ordinary lives and how on earth one might need to navigate the horrors of totalitarianism.

Sacred Treasure

• Love this poem by Bethany Besteman: In The Belly (HT Victoria Emily Jones)

• Ian Paul gives historical background to the business of clerical robes

• Want to learn ancient Greek through classic texts (including Koine Greek through the NT), then this looks like a great website: Kevilex

• Fascinating piece about being a Polyvocal Church (and I had no idea about that thing about birdsong!) And while we’re on that kind of subject:

  • How to help a church becomore interculturally aware from EA’s Israel Olofinjana

  • Does contemporary missiology need an adversary? Harvey Kwiani on characteristically insightful form

• Bet you can’t guess which continent’s donors are the most and least generous? Quite shocking…

• These 4 conversations from the Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts are fascinating (esp with Christopher le Brun, whom I interviewed for my DMin).

Topical Treasure

• As my 25s prove, I love reading around the world. This website is a brilliant aid to that: just click on the country and see the books. Epic (HT Chris Howles)

• Fascinating but long read about J-P Sartre’s ground-breaking 1945 lecture in war-shattered Paris, ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’

• A devastating poem: 82 final sentences from people executed in Texas, by Joe Kloc

• A huge archive of negatives from the Idi Amin era was discovered a decade ago in Uganda Broadcasting Company

Quirky Treasure

• Life in a bygone age: Edward Bawden’s English Village prints, evocative of holidays in my grandparents’ village as a child

• Robin Williams, the master improviser: lines that made it into his movies

• Love street art, and murals in particular. This is particularly spectacular from Fene, Galicia:

And finally, here’s another type of street art: drop in on the views from windows all around the world.

So here goes: a highly amateur selection of favourites.

5 Quirky Histories: PLACES

• AFRICA: John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of A Continent: Read while living in Uganda, Reader covers an entire continent throughout the entirety of human history. So not really an ambitious book at all. But he does a brilliant job. And especially important is his dismissal of the absurd notion in some quarters of Africa ‘not really having much history.’

• ULSTER: Martin Doyle’s Dirty Linen: The Troubles in my Home Place: Very much closer to home, Doyle’s study is just one Catholic parish in Armagh, Northern Ireland during the 25-year ‘Troubles’. Every murder and atrocity caused spirals of grief, and Doyle is remarkably even-handed and empathetic as he meets the survivors bereaved from all sides. Heartbreaking always, but occasionally hopeful too.

• VIENNA: Frederic Morton’s A Nervous Splendour: This is one of a pair of unique books that delve into a 12-month period in the life of Vienna (the other is Thunder at Twilight). Everyone was there: Freud, Mahler, Klimt, Herzl, Lenin, Hitler, Trotsky, Stalin!! The first leads up to the murder-suicide of the Crown-Prince and his lover at Mayerling in 1889, the second up to the assassination of the next Crown-Prince in Sarajevo in 1914. Both superb, but the first is (only marginally) better (for reasons I can’t decide!).

• BRITISH PALESTINE: Tom Segev’s One Palestine, Complete: After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, much of it was divvied up between Britain and France, with the newly formed League of Nations mandates. Eminent Israeli journalist and historian writes about the 3 decades in Palestine under British rule before the formation of the Israeli state. Fraught, complex, tragic. A brilliant account.

• COMMUNIST EUROPE: Ben Lewis’ Hammer & Tickle: I love communist jokes. And I'm fascinated by the Communist east. Lewis’s ingenious idea is to trace the history of both through the telling of (often illegal) jokes, many of which can be dated very specifically. Very funny and informative.

5 Quirky Histories: MOMENTS

• 1776: Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World: I was sceptical when I heard about the concept (that many aspects of the modern world can trace their origins to this one year). After reading it, I was fully convinced and actually jealous! I surprising and utterly compelling narrative, making for superb cultural history and a profound contribution to Christian apologetics.

• 1893: Joseph Horowitz’s Dvořák’s Prophecy, the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music: I love Dvořák’s music but I had no idea about his impact in the USA (everyone knows his New World Symphony, even if only from Hovis Bread adverts). He was brought over from Czechia to New York by a philanthropist with a vision for creating truly American music. He came for only 3 years, but his legacy was profound, especially on African Americans. It’s a legacy that white America has really taken another century to acknowledge.

• 1940-44: Lynne Olson’s Last Hope Island: as the nations of Europe fell into Nazi hands like dominoes, many governments in exile retreated to the last redoubt in the region: Britain. In 1940 there was no guarantee, of course, they would be safe there either. But this fascinating account looks into how these various administrations operated, both with or without British support.

• 1966-76: Tania Branigan’s Red Memory, The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution: I’ve never been to China so it somehow feels inconceivable to me. Too huge, too weighty and historic, too alien. And yet it holds a clear fascination. The Cultural Revolution was seismic and terrifying, a phenomenon which even 50 years on is still hard to grapple with (esp. with official censorship). Branigan does a remarkable job of digging, sifting, and reconstruction. Unforgettable.

• 1985: David Hoffman’s The Dead Hand, Reagan, Gorbachev & The Cold War Arms Race: How close did we come to Nuclear Armageddon? More to the point, why on earth didn’t we? A gripping account of the key players at the end of the Cold War and the 100s of others on all sides who played their part.

5 Quirky Histories: IDEAS

• Tom Holland’s Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind: this has rightly won plaudits and been widely read. Unputdownable and thrilling, Holland explains why the modern west owes far more to its Christian roots than even Christians recognise. This is a vital, and inspiring, record.

• James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science: When Newton said he could see so far because he stood on the shoulders of giants, the enlightenment propagandists assured us that he was referring to the Ancient Greeks. Not a bit of it. Hannam shows how significant, let alone advanced, Mediaeval science was, not in spite, but as a result, of its theistic framing.

• Ferdinand Mount’s Soft: A Brief History of Sentimentality: Ferdinand Mount has a brilliant, eagle-eyed erudition that draws threads in the most surprising ways. Why anyone might want a history of sentimentality was beyond me, until I read this and it makes perfect sense. Surprising and eye-opening, he makes a compelling case for empathy for others, in part by exposing the consequences of its rejection (through a classical indifference and disdain).

• Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science This is one of my favourite history books of all. I’d always assumed the Romantics rejected science as integral to their rejection of Enlightened reductionism. Not a bit of it. The likes of Coleridge and Wordsworth were fascinated by science and regularly attended public lectures at The Royal Institution by Faraday et al. All of which makes much more sense of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

• Tobias Hürter’s The Age of Uncertainty: how the greatest minds in physics changed the way we see the world: I am no scientist. And much of this book went over my head when it was describing the crazy world of subatomic science. But the human story I very much appreciated, learning a lot about the interactions of the biggest names of the century, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Curie, Bohr, Planck. Just wow.

5 Quirky Histories: ARTS

• Holbein: John North’s The Ambassador’s Secret: The story of one painting in the National Gallery, Holbein’s Ambassadors. How can one painting warrant an entire book. Well, the painting is a puzzle that triggers a myriad interpretations and decodings. It reads like a real life detective novel, opening windows into the continental earthquake that was the Reformation. Brilliant.

• Shakespeare: Jonathan Bate’s The Soul of the Age: I love Jonathan Bate’s books. He has made the study of Shakespeare his life’s work and here makes a convincing case for the grammar school Stratford boy being the playwright by simply combing through all the cultural and educational influences that someone of that background would encounter. He examines school curricula and common ideas in circulation. These are all then mapped onto the plays and poems with precision. What a great way to be immersed into the life of late Tudor England.

• Gauguin & van Gogh: Martin Gayford’s The Yellow House: Two very different artists who tried to make a fruitful artistic partnership in Arles, in France, but which was perhaps doomed from the start (temperamental differences, contrary expectations, the intensity of their labours, a natural competitiveness). Martin Gayford plots out each day of the 3 months that would be the most productive of both men’s lives.

• 5 Slade Artists: David Boyd Hancock’s A Crisis of Brilliance: The Slade School of Art in London has had a remarkable influence over its 150 years of existence. This book studies 5 Slade contemporaries (Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler, Richard Nevinson and Dora Carrington) who became war artists in the First World War and assesses the war’s impact on their work and lives. Devastating and inspiring in equal measure.

• Modern Classical Music: Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise—Listening to the Twentieth Century: Why did Classical Music shift from being popular and populist to niche and avant-garde? More to the point what music was being written and what was it seeking to do? Alex Ross is the long-standing Music Critic of the New Yorker and he makes 20thC music wonderfully accessible and interesting. There’s loads you will want to check out for yourself as a result.

5 Quirky Histories: REAL QUIRKS

• Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World: I’ve known Peter for decades and was stunned when this came out. He has astonishing breadth in his knowledge, understanding and scope; the result is a book that realigns impressions of global history especially for those with a Western/Eurocentric bias. I’d never have known he had it in him!

• Theodore Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity: One of the first books on this list that I read. Truly quirky, but again grappling with history on the grandest scale. How has society changed, how do men and women relate to one another, what matters to different cultures, etc? Fascinating questions all. But what makes the book genuinely surprising is that each focus is told through the lens of a different historical woman.

• Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War: Another war and its impact on creative people, but this time musicians after the Second World War: Shostakovich, Britten, Schoenberg, and Strauss each wrote music to respond and/or memorialise. Precisely what quirky history books should do, opening up a corner of life and experience that one would never think to explore.

• Lewis Baston’s Borderlines: A History of Europe Told from the Edges: Unlike many of the post-colonial regions of the world (that often have completely bonkers borders drawn on a vast scale), Europe has scores of borders that are bonkers at the opposite end of the spectrum. Soooo interesting and explains so much about the region.

• David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History: Aaronovitch takes the 20 most influential conspiracy theories of the last 100 years and analyses their roots, commonalities, and dangers: from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Princess Diana’s death, via JFK and the moon landings. So helpful and needed now more than ever.