In November 2018, the painting, Portrait of an Artist, sold at auction in New York for $90 million. At the time, it was the highest sum paid for a work of art by a living artist. The artist in question, David Hockney, is alive and...
At breakfast in the Bethany Diner last week, I recognized the song playing as background music - it was “Soul Rebel”, by the Wailers. The Diner had tuned to a reggae station and here was music I knew well, having had this record in my...
In 2009 I attended the annual summer Vacation Biblical School in Oxford, England, for three days of lectures on Bible-related themes. It was an opportunity to hear eminent Biblical scholars expound on topics they had studied in detail, and also to meet them informally over...
Americans, being independently minded, are proud of the fact that they dispensed with the government of King George III in 1776. Having freed themselves from the tyranny of “taxation without representation”, early Americans forged a new country out of the old, one based on an...
We own a cat, whose name is Mani. He used to belong to our daughter, but when she left for college, Mani stayed behind. He is the third “person” in our home. He has his own distinct personality, and enjoys the run of the “estate”,...
My wife and I, along with our young son, had recently arrived back in Brighton, England. We had been living abroad for two years and were renting an apartment temporarily, while we looked for something more permanent. Two months after our return, my wife became...
In the past 100 years, the greatest enemy of Christianity - and indeed humanity - has been the ideology of communism. Put forward as a solution to economic inequality, communism’s record as the most murderous political and social movement in human history is without parallel. Communism...
The Benedictine monk Augustine Hooey was a teacher, confessor and spiritual director in the Church of England. He led retreats and taught in schools and churches, working well into his nineties (he died in 2017, a few months short of his 102nd birthday). He was not...
The first book I can remember owning was Think Like a Grandmaster by Alexander Kotov, which my parents bought for my 16th birthday. At the time I was a keen chess player, thanks to the encouragement of my maths teacher Mr Goodall, who organized a...
Last weekend I dreamed I was driving along a highway in the middle of the ocean. I drove at a steady speed of 45 mph, watching the unchanging road ahead of me as it disappeared toward the horizon. I continued driving for what seemed like...