For whom does the bell toll? On Donne, death and Marxist anthropology

Ernest Hemingway’s (1899-1961) novel about the Spanish Civil War (1936-9), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), takes its title from a meditation by a former Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, John Donne (1572-1631; Meditation XVII of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions). The poem ends with the poignant lines (mod. transl.): ‘And therefore never send to […]

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‘The lady’s not for turning’: on leadership, folly and tragedy

In a world of corrupted ‘news’ (see Weekly Briefing, 5 October 2020) speech writers have a vital role. Their job is to anticipate – and redirect – editorial agendas with timely one-liners. Sir Ronald Millar (1919-1998) – by profession an actor, script writer and dramatist – had been British PM Margaret Thatcher’s (1925-2013) speech writer […]

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‘Shut up, man’: on Everest, silence and presidential debates

The twists and turns of this year’s US Presidential Election are keeping commentators and electors unusually busy. Industries and individuals whose livelihoods depend on making and selling ‘news’ are delighted, of course. We don’t need them to tell us more is to come! Our world is full, overfull surely, of what is still (presumptuously or […]

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‘If music be the food of love, play on …’: Music, Love, and Reconciliation

I am delighted to introduce Dr. Mark Hijleh to you as the author of this week’s Oxford House ‘Weekly Briefing’. Mark is Provost of The King’s College, New York and an Associate of Oxford House, specialising in music and culture. With degrees from John Hopkins University, the University of Sheffield (UK), Ithaca College and William […]

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‘Season of mists and mellow faithfulness’: on hope for a depressed world

Some people are making money out of COVID-19: many are not. Depending on their field, some researchers have never known it so good: others are out of a job. Investment in finding an effective vaccine against coronavirus is a plausible priority. Pharmaceutical companies, like on-line marketing and food suppliers, producers of PPE, cleaning products and […]

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“A plague o’ both your houses”: Mercutio, Camus and the coronavirus crisis of faith

The curse uttered three times in Act III.1 of Shakespeare’s (1564-1614) tragedy Romeo and Juliet (1597), ‘A plague o’ both your houses’ (when Mercutio is stabbed by Juliet’s Capulet cousin Tybalt), has become an icon of Western nihilism (life has no meaning or values). Sometimes translated ‘a pox on both your houses’, the words give […]

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Faith in Moscow? Putin and the resurgence of ‘political truth’ in Russia

There is a moving scene in the Russian dissident novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s (1918-2008) The Gulag Archepelago ([1973] ET 1974) where the mastermind behind the Cheka (the brutal Soviet secret police established in 1917), ‘Iron Felix’ Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926), interrogates the mystical Orthodox author and political dissident Nicolai Berdyaev (1874-1948). Solzhenitsyn writes – and, of course, we […]

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