The Hearth of Mopsus

I find my Lent Quiet Days in Simon and Clarissa's Garden Room at Bortley Mill  just as worthwhile as the more extended time I spent over...

A friend may be leaving Oxford, a city she loves, after more than two decades. The 1930s is not her favoured period, but having heard Doroth...

I read Rose Macaulay's The Pleasure of Ruins  many years ago, but it has taken me until now to get around to her final and most celebrat...

This is a book I wouldn’t have bought but for my vague sense of being honour-bound to cast an eye over anything about the Goth world that em...

One thing among many that happens when you are an ordained member of the Body of Christ is that you acquire other people’s cast-off books. S...

In 2014 Guy and Catharine English began a retirement project of visiting the holy wells of Cornwall. They acquired copies of the books that ...

Here's a tangled story. My investigations of the holy wells of Glastonbury led me to the history of the town published in 1826 by the Re...

My spiritual reading at the moment is Catherine de Hueck Doherty's Poustinia  from 1977, an examination of the Orthodox Christian concep...

It’s only at the very end of his second book – his first, Cured (2016), described how The Cure came into being, what he did in the band, and...

‘There is no coincidence in this world, only inevitability’, insisted Yuuko Ichihara of xxxHolic , and the transdimensional witch’s words ar...

A little while ago I reported on Cathi Unsworth's fantastic epic on Goth In The Time Of Thatcher, Season of the Witch , and on Wednesday...

The BBC can be forgiven for saving money by rebroadcasting programmes when they suddenly become relevant again, and when I heard Sarah Monta...

When it’s worth reading a book’s Acknowledgments because of their wit and warmth, that volume deserves high praise. Such is Cathi Unsworth’s...

It is not, I think, an easy matter to write well about popular music. It is often very, very hard to account for the appeal of a particular ...

A little while ago Lady Arlen was kind enough to send me a copy of her first proper  volume of poetry, Shouting at Crows . I put it in the l...

You might remember me writing about Emma Tennant’s novel Queen of Stones , the feminisation of Lord of the Flies that culminates bloodily on...

A nicer anniversary falling today (as well as being Lady Arlen and Madame Morbidfrog's birthdays) is that PJ Harvey's To Bring You M...

My last two attempts to get to the Surrey History Centre in Woking were stymied by the fact that the heating there had broken down. I might ...

When Emma Tennant’s Tess went into shops in 1994, I hope nobody bought it looking for a light bit of romantic fiction with a happy ending. T...

Fr Jeremy, the Roman Catholic parish priest, used to sit on the board of the Surrey Churches Preservation Trust and suggested we go to a Tru...