Frozen In Time: A Classicist’s Portrait of Interwar Oxford
In one of the more blatantly cliché moments of my life, I watched the 1981 TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s iconic Oxford interwar novel Brideshead Revisited. Notwithstanding the fact that Oxford only features in the first four episodes, it remains that for many of us, Brideshead played a part in
Variation on a Regicide
Enter SILVIO, wearing bloodstained crown, clutching dagger SILVIO: Well, it’s done, and my heart is sicker for it. The head that wears the crown rests uneasy, Or so said the king. He was wrong: mine rests not at all. If you can bear it, bear me to the stage, Where players dance and [
Plague Addiction
[CW: drug use] I have a complex relationship with Gower – that vindictive old man – late-medieval English poet, moralist, and reactionary. He is someone I would usually despise, not least because of his belief that the peasantry should be “bound in chains and under our foo
Lección de Cocina
The kitchen is gleaming white. It’s a shame to have to tarnish it with use. You’d need to sit down to contemplate it, to describe it, to close your eyes, to conjure it up. Pay close attention to this neatness, this purity which is not to that dazzling excess that gives you chills in hospitals. [
Dhá véarsaí as: Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire
Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire is an 18th century Irish-language wife’s lament, commemorating a husband murdered by an Anglo-Irish official. Do bhuaileas go luath mo bhasa is do bhaineas as na reathaibh chomh maith is bhí sé agam, go bhfuaras romham tú marbh Cois toirín ísil aitinn, gan
Mist
i. I say, I come from an island I am touched by salt, separated by straits, embraced by streams of motorcycle engines revving into side streets, the names of which I can no longer read. In Taiwan, we say the sun is going down a mountain when it sets. I have always known the […]
In the Path of a Distant Star: in search of Allende’s lost generation
In late December 2021, following a long nail-biting campaign, insurgent left-wing candidate Gabriel Boric was announced as the victor in Chile’s presidential election. Boric, a former student leader, swept the polls roundly defeating far-right candidate José Antonio Kast, becoming the youngest pr
‘And So, My Brother, Hail, and Farewell!’
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. — ‘Lycidas’, Milton One April afternoon in 2020, during the sudden lull of lockdown, I placed a shoebox on my sun-flooded desk. I lifted outa photograph of myself as a toddler, bright-eyed against a dull