Category Archives: Reading

“Blake’s London: the Topographic Sublime” by Iain Sinclair

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

The text of a lecture given at Swedenborg House in Bloomsbury, beautifully published by the Swedenborg Archive. Sinclair ranges across territory familiar to those who’ve met his writing before: a historical sense of London very much rooted in place, in … Continue reading →

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“The Tao Of Pooh” by Benjamin Hoff; “The Secret Message Of Jesus” by Brian Maclaren (the latter only skimmed)

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

Both try to explain how life should be lived, and to that extent are self-help books. Maclaren writes from within an orthodox US Christian perspective, but reinterprets Jesus’ message as a call to a radical politics and a suspicion of … Continue reading →

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Fictional characters’ worlds

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

Sherlock Holmes lives in a London identical to the one in which Conan Doyle’s books about him were published, except that it contained no books about him by Conan Doyle. Doctor Who couldn’t watch Doctor Who. Novels, in the very … Continue reading →

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“Latin forms of address from Plautus to Apuleius” by Eleanor Dickey

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

Beautifully written and produced – hardly a single typo throughout. Her introduction is a fascinating survey of forms of address across languages, and is particularly interesting on English. Although much of the detail is there more for scholarly completeness than … Continue reading →

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“Rambling on the Path to Rome” by Peter Francis Browne

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

For decades I’ve been an admirer of Hilaire Belloc’s The Path To Rome, so in a charity shop in Lancaster I grabbed at Peter Francis Browne’s account of his late-20th-century retracing of the same journey. Belloc’s walk had been a … Continue reading →

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“The New Jerusalem” by Emanuel Swedenborg

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

Starts as a promising attempt to work out a spiritual life from first principles. Swedenborg’s (admittedly naive) mutually-derived binary oppositions (so Good and Truth give respectively Will and Intellect, which, again respectively, give Charity and Faith; so, Good leads to … Continue reading →

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“Smiley’s People” by John le Carré

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Houyhnhnm

Developing to some kind of resolution the story of Smiley and Karla, subtly making clearer the binary connections between them. P450 tries to make this explicit: Karla’s being brought down by Smiley’s defining compassion; Smiley’s being somehow damaged by his … Continue reading →

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“Hans Keller and Internment” by Alison Garnham

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Houyhnhnm

Garnham’s book ‘tells’ (see below for more on how) the story of the Austrian émigré musician, writer and broadcaster Hans Keller from his beginnings in pre-War Vienna to his bursting onto the British musical scene in the late 40s. She … Continue reading →

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“The Last Philosophy” by Don Cupitt

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Houyhnhnm

A masterpiece in atheistic religion. Cupitt steers a path between realism and non-realism by on the one hand arguing that the three ’worlds’ of external reality, inner consciousness, and language are all made of the same stuff, all language-formed (or … Continue reading →

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“We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Lionel Shriver, and film

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Houyhnhnm

The three of us sat in silence at the end and had to have a beer before going home. I’d read the book, another had read its beginning, the other none. Two significant changes: removing the epistolary form of letters … Continue reading →

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