Peter Sellers, of “Pink Panther” fame, lived life on a permanent search for spiritual purpose. It has to be said that it took him in some slightly curious directions.
Christopher Sandford
Christopher Sandford is the author of many books, including, most recently, Zeebrugge: The Greatest Raid of All (Casemate).
Posted inArts & Culture, Ideas
Puccini, opera and the arts as a gift from God
Giacomo Puccini, the composer of “La Bohème,” “Tosca” and “Madama Butterfly,” has been called the world’s most popular songwriter, and with good reason.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
The Irish rebel who wrote ‘the first modern thriller’
Erskine Childers went from being the John le Carré of his day to a convicted war criminal and nationalist martyr.
Posted inArts & Culture, Ideas
Kurt Vonnegut would still be amused.
The absolute refusal to accept handed-down truths—whether in politics, science, religion or art—was a constant in Kurt Vonnegut’s life and work.
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We’ve been reading Charles Darwin all wrong
Charles Darwin’s teaching has been misappropriated by generations of intellectually dubious adherents.
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F*scist is still a bad word. And your political enemy probably isn’t one.
Fascism has proved sufficiently elastic to be used as a term of abuse across the political spectrum.
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When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (maybe) spoke with the dead
‘The root of Spiritism…is the diseased moral condition of the age,’ one Catholic author wrote.
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Herman Melville: obsessed by good, evil and ‘Moby Dick’
Melville, who was born 200 years ago this August, was consumed with the issue of humanity’s capacity for good or evil.
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Questioning the narrative about the Treaty of Versailles
The treaty’s offhand attitude toward the non-European world stirred up resentments that lingered for decades.
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The road from T. E. Lawrence’s Damascus to Syria’s civil war
Lawrence’s triumphant arrival in Damascus in 1918 might be said to have been the spark that ultimately ignited a powder keg of factional rivalries and distrust.