Young Woman with a Mission
January 2026
In my article of 2019, I wrote about the then current media iconography that surrounded Greta Thunberg which portrayed her very distinctly in terms of the symbolic representation of sainthood. This article seeks to update the picture. Has Greta lost some of her charisma, has the icon become tarnished with the imperfections of worldliness, as many saints have in the past?..
Does Getting Old Give You a New Perspective on History?
December 2025
Old age calls for an individual’s subjective repositioning in time as one’s personal future gets shorter. When you are young you can consider whole chunks of time, ten, twenty, thirty years or so and position yourself at the end of them. Ten years older, twenty years older, yes, but still, somehow the same me, capable of all the things I’m capable of now; one lives in the moment and that moment always stays subjectively the same…
Some thoughts on Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935)
March 2025
Why isn’t everyone talking about this book? Why hasn’t it been made into a film? Sinclair Lewis’s novel takes aspects of Hitler’s rise and applies them to an American scenario. An unprincipled man becomes a popular leader and achieves power through various cunning means: adept use of the ballot box, a gross manipulation of free speech, a distortion of language and an admixture of very bad ideas with a few good ones…
Apologies for history? Fact and Fiction
June 2022
The modern practice of apologising for history has its supporters and detractors. The issue shows how history is still at work in the present. The passions aroused and the partisan approaches taken indicate that in some respects we are no more sophisticated than our medieval forbears…
The Holy Maid of Stockholm
July 2019
Has anyone else been struck by the iconography going on around Greta Thunberg? Her image, often presented as a facial close-up, in the style of an icon, commands attention. A pure face devoid of worldly appetites or desires, untouched by make-up but beautified by inner strength and dedication to a cause, hands clasped prayerfully under the chin, a braid of hair escaping over the shoulder. The very image of a medieval Holy Maid…
Some Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
June 2018
Reading this book is like looking through a glass darkly, you must be patient as, little by little, the initial situation is put into context. A huge historical dislocation has happened very quickly, suddenly everything you knew is done away with as the long-term forces which have been inherent in society for years suddenly jolt into a complete overthrow of what went before. America becomes the totalitarian state of Gilead by a violent coup which destroys the President and the entire political elite…