MY NEW BOOK AND SCHRODINGER’S CAT
You may wonder what my new book and Schrödinger’s cat have in common. The answer is almost certainly nothing at all. Except that my new book, like Schrödinger’s cat, currently exists in two mutually exclusive states. It may fly high. It may sink like a dead weight. Until publication, both possibilities remain alive. And in […]
STUART CHRISTIE – THE ANARCHIST WHO TRIED TO KILL FRANCO
Nothing much was happening on that warm August morning in Madrid in 1964, and that was just how the dictatorship liked it. Pretty girls, daring to wear skirts above the knee – it was the sixties – sat at café tables with boys daring to let their hair grow over their collars. Traffic moved […]
EVERYONE SHOULD WANT TO BE SIMONE WEIL
Everyone should want to be Simone Weil. Not because she makes life easier. Quite the opposite. Weil has the irritating habit of making you suspicious of your own excuses. You finish reading a page of her work and discover that something you had previously called a “boundary” might just have been selfishness, and what […]
THEY DON’T BURN BOOKS ANYMORE
Why don’t they burn books anymore? It’s too much bother. Why organise a bonfire, gather a mob, make speeches and strike dramatic poses when people will quietly dispose of books themselves? Nowadays unwanted books are placed in cardboard boxes beside the rubbish bins or in those little wooden libraries nailed to garden fences, where they […]
The Road to Pagan
The road to Pagan began in 1973, when I studied Buddhism in Dharamsala, India, and worked with a small team translating the dharma into English. Once a week we were invited for salty tea and barfi – Indian sweets – with the Dalai Lama at what was grandly called his palace: in truth, a modest […]
DAVID BOWIE HEARS THE ECHOES OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
The life of David Bowie unfolded in the long shadow of conflicts he never witnessed, yet profoundly absorbed. Among these, the Spanish Civil War stands as a formative rupture in modern European consciousness – a battle whose emotional and ideological aftershocks reverberated through generations of artists. Bowie, though born after its conclusion, became one of […]
THE ITALIAN SKEDADDLE: THE BATTLE FOR GUADALAJARA
In March 1937, amid the mud and uncertainty of the Spanish Civil War, a curious and telling episode unfolded on the plains northeast of Madrid. The Battle of Guadalajara would become one of the most symbolic Republican victories of the war – not merely for its tactical success, but for the humiliation it inflicted upon Benito […]
CARAVAGGIO STOLE MY HEART & LED ME TO THE ABYSS
Caravaggio taught me that the true artist must be brave and reckless – that he must step outside comfort, hold his gaze steady, and look where others look away. He was a drunkard, a brawler, almost certainly a killer, and unquestionably that rare thing: a genius. He stole my heart. I was fifteen when I […]
WHEN THE COLD WAR FELL ON SPAIN
Sixty years ago, when the Cold War fell on Spain, the people of Palomares saw a broken arrow quivering in the soil. It was 17 January 1966. Over the Mediterranean, at 31,000 feet, a United States Air Force B-52G bomber eased in behind a KC-135 tanker for its second mid-air refuelling of the day. The mission was […]
BUDDY HOLLY – THE BOY IN GLASSES WHO REWROTE THE WORLD
The importance of Buddy Holly to modern popular music is difficult to overstate. His recording career lasted barely eighteen months, yet the template he established — self-written songs, distinctive sound, creative control in the studio — reshaped the possibilities of rock and roll. For artists who followed, including Bob Dylan and John Lennon, Holly was […]
BOB DYLAN AND JOAN BAEZ – LOVE, SILENCE AND SONG
The love story between Bob Dylan and Joan Baez is one of the most mythologised relationships in twentieth-century music — not because it was simple, but because it wasn’t. It was a romance forged in the charged air of the early 1960s folk revival, sustained by admiration and rivalry, and reshaped by ambition, pride and time. What endured, long […]
COULD SOCIALISM WORK IN BRITAIN?
The question: Could Socialism Work in Britain? is often posed as though it were a speculative experiment. In truth, Britain has already lived through a period in which democratic socialist principles shaped the state — and did so with lasting effect. Public memory of the mid-twentieth century is dominated by the towering figure of Winston […]
THE FIRST COMMERCIAL FLIGHT ACROSS THE ATLANTIC
On 28 June 1939, as Europe drifted towards war and diplomacy frayed in the summer heat, a great silver flying boat rose from the waters of Port Washington, New York, and turned east. She was Pan American Airways’ Boeing 314, christened Dixie Clipper. Her destination was Lisbon and this was the first commercial flight across […]
THE BLACK WIDOW OF CADAQUÉS
Cadaqués is a fishing village on the Mediterranean, wedged between mountains and sea, just shy of the French border. It is celebrated as the home of Salvador Dalí and, more quietly, as a long-term haunt of Marcel Duchamp. Over time, a procession of painters, writers and intellectuals has transformed this hamlet of fewer than 3,000 […]
KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING PLANTED THE SEED FOR 1984
George Orwell’s ‘Keep the Aspidistra Flying’ planted the seed for ‘1984.’ The early novel from 1936 is often dismissed as a minor work: a satirical portrait of a disgruntled poet railing against money, respectability and middle-class conformity. Yet read closely, it reveals the portal to Orwell’s dystopian vision of ‘1984’, first published in 1949. The […]
We Shall Pass – Where Stories Come From
Bob Dylan once remarked that he didn’t so much write his songs as catch them – phrases drifting overhead like contrails in the upper air, waiting for someone with a net. The beginnings of my novel We Shall Pass arrived that way. Not as a plot, nor even an idea, but as fragments: the corner piece of […]
GEORGES BERNANOS: CONSCIENCE OF THE DEFEATED
Georges Bernanos was a Catholic writer acclaimed for his novel Under the Sun of Satan – the story of a disillusioned priest. He arrived in Majorca in 1934, weary of Parisian literary squabbles and politics. The Mediterranean light, he thought, would heal him. He rented a house near Palma surrounded by olive trees and the dry […]
EL CAMPESINO – THE GENERAL WHO FOUGHT FRANCO AND STALIN
He stepped down from the train in Moscow in the winter of 1939. He was frostbitten and famished but still carried himself with the confidence of a man accustomed to command. The Soviet official noted his profession on the entry papers: campesino, peasant – unaware that the term had once rumbled like artillery across the […]
THE WOMAN WHO SAVED THE TREES
The woman who saved the trees had no history of protest or training in activism, but as winter storms swept across Northern California in December 1997, she climbed into the branches of a thousand-year-old redwood and refused to come down. Her name was Julia “Butterfly” Hill. The tree was Luna—180 feet of ancient resilience, a […]
ESMOND ROMILLY – PUBLIC SCHOOL REBEL
Esmond Romilly was born into both privilege and rebellion. The nephew of Winston Churchill, he was expected to inherit a place within Britain’s ruling class. Instead, he turned against it. At Wellington College, a bastion of empire and discipline, he edited a radical school magazine denouncing fascism, militarism and hypocrisy. The headmaster expelled him. By […]