In 1956 Gordonstoun School was in transition between the founding spirit of Kurt Hahn, an educational genius who ran the school by force of his (warm, eccentric) personality and a…
‘Archipelago, A Reader’, edited by Nicolas Allen and Fiona Stafford (published by the Lilliput Press, Dublin) This is both a lengthy and weighty volume. But its 578 pages are full…
I My section of the Union Canal has been refilled. It had been drained away almost to nothing so its embankments could be exposed and studied by maintenance engineers for…
We blew north on a gale, the little plane trembling, its wings at play. âWe landed by the skin of our teethâ, the captain announced cheerfully at our pit stop…
Last month, 19 schoolchildren and two teachers were fatally shot in Uvalde, a small town in Texas. Reporting on the angry reactions in America, a BBC newsreader referred to the…
The right book will find you at the right time. I like to think that life, with all its intricate coincidences, only appears to have patterns; it’s all random. Yet…
Good news of any kind is in short supply these days. Two areas of our life in which negative reports prevail are the behaviour of today’s teenagers, and the state…
A telephone is ringing in the darkness and snatches of conversation can be heard: ‘same slate’, ‘still running’, ‘cut-throat’… ‘Okay, Rick, whatâs the game?’ ‘Cut-throat’ ‘Whatâs the object of it?’…
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted on 10 December 1948, in reaction to the atrocities of the Second World War. The preamble states that ‘recognition of the…