Archbishop of Banterbury
Melissa Cormican’s animal portraits
Kieran Healy, responding to the news that Great Britain will have a Free Speech Tsar:
As an alternative to ‘Free Speech Tsar’, consider one or more of the following: The Duke of Discourse. Warden of All Chit-Chat. Equerry of Arguments. Gold Stick To The Point. The Earl of Axiom. The Keeper of the King’s Premises. The Wheedle Beadle. Chief Constable Counterexample. The Postillion of Positing. The Justiciar of Just One More Thing. The Marquess of My Question is More of a Comment. The Archbishop of Banterbury. The Lord Privy Sealion. Groom of the Discourse. Chancellor of the Factchequer. Red Herring Pursuivant. Master of the Eyerolls.
Connie Converse on Walter Cronkite’s show in 1954, from this lovely NYT essay.
A beautiful essay by James Conaway on visiting the high Arctic: “I tell the pilot that if I am not back in camp in two days I will be over on the Lewis River, headed back to camp, and I gesture. The casualness of this request will come back to haunt me, but for now I am walking across what feels like a newly minted, untrod land.”
In 1981, John Fowles wrote an introduction to a strange and lovely novel by one G. B. Edwards, about a life on the island of Guernsey that began in the late 19th century. Fowles mused,
We are still too close to it to realize what an astounding and unprecedented change, unprecedented both in its extent and its speed, has taken place in the psyche of Western mankind during those eighty years. In very many ways, and certainly for the working-class majority, the late 19th century remained closer to the 17th than to our own. It is only the very old now who can fully understand this: what it means to have known, in the one lifespan, both a time when city streets were full of horses, the car not yet invented, and a time when man stood on the moon; or even more incomprehensibly, both a time when even the most terrible weapons could kill a few hundred at most, and a time when their power risks entire cities - and their aftermath, whole countries.
It is almost as if in those same eighty years we left the old planet and found a new; and we are all, however brashly contemporary, however much we take modern technology for granted, still victims of that profound cultural shock.
I have long thought that the exemplary figure representing this transformative era was George Bernard Shaw, who was born in 1856 – before the American Civil War; when Wordsworth had been dead just six years – and died in 1950, in the atomic age.
I wonder if in some sense we’re still adjusting, even now, to that change. Even those born into this moment bear with them a genetic fitness to an earlier one.