Monthly Archives: July 2008

Gone Fishing

I’m off to the photograph in the header for three weeks and I don’t plan to post anything until August the 6th or 7th. Have a wonderful summer, all of you.

Posted in Blather, Housekeeping, Sweden | 1 Comment

FT review of Fishing in Utopia

Another gratifying review, from the Financial Times, where Hugh Carnegy, the executive editor, likes Fishing in Utopia,a lot, though he thinks, god knows why, that I am “a melancholy soul”. It is the window on Sweden that gives this book … Continue reading

Posted in Journalism, Literature, Science without worms, Sweden, Travel notes | 3 Comments

a throwaway line

All civilisation depends on two things: self-restraint and hope for the future. That’s why it can survive some wars. But if they go, it goes.

Posted in Blather | 4 Comments

Another really good review

John Carey reviews Fishing in Utopia,in the Sunday Times: thoughtful and illuminating, with a kindly quote towards the end: Fishing in Utopia is a lament for a lost Eden. But it is more than that. Essentially it is a story … Continue reading

Posted in Journalism, Literature, Sweden | 5 Comments

Back to bed with Diarmaid

Another hundred pages of MacCulloch’s Reformation this morning; wonderful stuff. The parallels with today are not in the least bit cheering; among them the way in which the printing press, like the Internet, allowed everyone, however ignorant, to join in theological … Continue reading

Posted in God, Literature | 1 Comment

Buy this week’s New Yorker

for a wonderful essay on Chesterton by Adam Gopnik (not online) which tackles the question of his anti-semitism head on. I had not realised quite how vile it was; as Gopnik says, if he was a man of his time, … Continue reading

Posted in Journalism, Literature | 1 Comment

A glimpse of hell

Perhaps because I am feeling depressed by illness, unable either to walk or work as hard as is normally needed to keep low spirits away, the world seems horribly meretricicious. I watched an episode of the Wire last night, in … Continue reading

Posted in Blather | 5 Comments

Four weeks

Tomorrow it will be four weeks since the bloody ear infection started, which explains the infrequency of posting. In that time I have never known whether some sudden injudicious gesture, like wiping a sweaty forehead on my sleeve, will convert … Continue reading

Posted in Blather, Housekeeping | Comments Off on Four weeks