In the mid–path of my life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood,' writes Dante, in The Divine Comedy, beginning a quest that will lead to transformation and redemption. A journey through the dark of the woods is a motif common to fairy tales: youn...
How many of us would ever explore the dark extremities of our own humanity were we not from time to time thrown into them involuntarily? 'Necessity is laid upon me,' wrote the apostle Paul; and mostly it is only of necessity, through the inescapabili...
Rome has been called the "Sacred City": - might not our Oxford be called so too? There is an air about it, resonant of joy and hope: it speaks with a thousand tongues to the heart: it waves its mighty shadow over the imagination: it stands in lowly s...
A menudo se usa la historia como una serie de cuentos morales para aumentar la solidaridad de grupo o, cosa más defendible, según mi punto de vista, para explicar el desarrollo de instituciones importantes como los parlamentos y conceptos como la d...
El estudio de la economía no parece exigir ningún don especializado de un orden excepcionalmente superior. ¿No es una disciplina muy fácil comparada con las ramas superiores de la filosofía o la ciencia pura?. Una disciplina fácil de la que muy...
It’s much easier to remember the World Series heroics of Tony Pérez, Pete Rose, and Joe Morgan than it is to recall who set the table for Rose during Game 7 of the 1975 World Series vs. Boston. The Red Sox led 3-2 in the seventh when [Ken] Griffey...
How about a little teaser from CROWN OF ICE? Thyra Winther, the current Snow Queen speaks about her "home": At night the palace’s crystal halls are tinged sapphire. One of the first bits of magic that Voss taught me was to set the carved walls alig...
The blossoms seem unusually lovely this year. There were none of the scarlet-and-white-striped curtains that are set up among the blossoming trees so invariably that one has to come to think of them as the attire of cherry blossoms; there were no bus...
Most Romans believed that their system of government was the finest political invention of the human mind. Change was inconceivable. Indeed, the constitution's various parts were so mutually interdependent that reform within the rules was next to imp...
So in this Hemisphere when the moon goes down, I sit in one of those all-night-into-mornings cafes, watching short short skies below the skyscrapers and low-rises and sense the big turntables turning and the roadies setting up from stadium to stadium...
I had lied to myself from the very beginning, deceived myself into believing that I was being fanciful and overly imaginative. Surely such monstrosities only existed in nightmares? Yet I had lived through a nightmare these past months, and that was n...
Specific parts of you personality may be angry and are usually easily evoked. because these parts are dissociated, anger remains an emotion that is not integrated for you as a whole person. Even though individuals with dissociative disorder are respo...
Woolf ’s control over the production of her own work is a significant factor in her genesis as a writer. The Hogarth Press became an important and influential publishing house in the decades that followed. It was responsible, for example, for the f...
For the first time his senses began to register the exotic, heady atmosphere of Mumbai...the odors most insistently demanded his attention. There were layers upon layers of them, all present at once but individually distinct. They shifted in strength...
Silence!” Korbolo snapped. He eyed Duiker. “You are the historian who rode with Coltaine.” The historian faced him. “I am.” “You are a soldier.” “As you say.” “I do, and so you shall die with these soldiers, in a manner no differe...
What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously ma...
Cixi was not at the coronation. The majestic main part of the Forbidden City was out of bounds to her – because she was a woman. She still could not set foot in it, even though she was now the de facto ruler. In fact, when her sedan-chair went with...
I am alone. I am here. No one is watching me. In these hours of silence that I cherish, I talk to myself and reflect. That past, entrenched in time, motionless and infinite, has vanished onto thin air. None of it remains. Why, therefore, am I hurting...
The padres set great store by addressing prayer to personal gods: 'Genuine prayer exists only in religions in which there is a God as a person and a shape and endowed with a will.' That was stated by a famous Protestant. The anarch does not want to h...
This, since junior school, had been virtually my only experience of women—as fantasy figures. Reading about women in fantasy novels had set me an even more unrealistic point of view. The doesn't help, with its sexless visions of elf maidens who may...
The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand-new creation. Not to make people with better morals but to create a community of prophets and ...
