Restorations and Discoveries
The restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece My buddy Austin Kleon is at home with his kids, confined by the chronovirus. I took the last month away from my...
The Proverbial Memory Lane
Beautiful or out of scale? I wrote for the Hedgehog Review about Alexander Herzen, the central figure of Tom Stoppard’s sprawling and marvelous trilogy The...
Vantablack Fish and Lissajous Figures
I’m very pleased to announce that I’m about to start work on a critical edition of Auden’s book The Shield of Achilles. (About my immediately forthcoming...
Concerning Forests and Tools
Photo by Jim Champion If I’m ever allowed to return to England, I want to visit the New Forest, which has been a royal forest since just a few years after...
This & That & the Other Thing
Why not read some books about the ampersand? & On July 10 at 1:30pm Eastern Time I’ll be conversing with the good folks at the Trinity Forum about Christian...
Living Room, Working Space
Musicians in Barcelona rehearsing before an audience of ... plants. Strange phenomena in Wiltshire! “What we’re seeing is two massive monuments with their...
The Far Invisible
REM Island, a pirate radio station off the Dutch Coast (1964). Here’s the story of how BBC Radio 1 emerged from pirate radio. Among the greatest poems...
Humble Cottages and a Royal Game
The art of Eric Ravilious (1902-1942) is deceptively simple and straightforward. Here is a wonderful tribute by Niall Gooch. I have a few Ravilious images on...
A Miscellany of Pleasant Distractions
The Baroque is one of my least favorite architectural eras, but, strangely enough, I think the most beautiful church I have ever seen with my own eyes is...
On Noble Things He Stands
Behold, a king will reign in righteousness, and princes will rule in justice. Each will be like a hiding place from the wind, a shelter from the storm, like...
The Garlands of Repose
Last week I found myself … well, obsessed might be slightly too strong a word — but let’s say compelled by this three-minute video of English gardening...
Springing Up, Springing Back
As promised, Snakes and Ladders is now sponsored by Comment, and I’m really happy about that. If you’d like to know what Comment is all about, you might want...
A Transitional Sort of Message
For some time now, I have been proud to be a Contributing Editor at Comment, a fine journal edited by Anne Snyder and published by Cardus, an independent...
In Which This Writer Is Rather Frantic
I wrote last time about the cool things that angels do in Arcabas’s paintings, but here’s another: they spring apostles from jail. Some of you are quite...
Easter with Arcabas
Today I am remembering Jean-Marie Pirot (1926-2018), universally known as Arcabas. Arcabas, whose work I was introduced to many years ago by my friend and...
Letting Go, Holding On
My favorite song by War is “Slippin’ into Darkness” (1971), and one of the things I like best about it is the extremely spare horn chart. Spare but oh so...
Growth and Form, Grief and Love
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948) was a Scottish polymath, a scholar who was in his long professional life offered academic positions in classics,...
Gardens and Books, Crosses and Comforts
Charles Mahoney, “The Garden” (1950); see this lovely essay by Jenny Uglow about paintings of gardens; it’s based on this exhibition at the Garden Museum in...
Joyful Sounds and Hidden Lives
Let’s start our week off right, and by right, I mean by listening to four transcendent musicians playing with virtuosity and utter joy: There should be a...
Texty and Readerly
Here’s a video explaining the making of the Library of Nonhuman Books. And you may purchase some of those nonhuman books here. As for me, I think I’ll save...