Category: writing

• Christopher Neve on the humanity of art

  Jul 18

  ‘- and you can never be more happy than your least happy child.’ Christopher Neve, Immortal Thoughts, Late Style in a Time of Plague Christopher Neve died in 2024, aged… more ›

• Taking stock

  May 24

  Earlier this week, I spent several hours going through a jumble of old drafts and notebooks, combining them into a single document. It was instructive. First, I realised that I… more ›

• The untimely judge

  May 12

  I have been working on A Selfless Art for three years, thinking, reading and writing. I have been turning in circles for three years, starting, stopping, starting again. I understood why when… more ›

• Ursula K. Le Guin on the misuse of language

  Apr 6

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• Fragments

  Apr 5

  The structure of a text is critical to my writing. I need to see the map of the journey before I can set out, just in outline though—I like discovering… more ›

• Community art or co-creation?

  Mar 15

  Last Friday, Arlene Goldbard and I recorded an episode of our podcast. Mostly, we have guests but about a third of the podcasts are just conversations between us, and this… more ›

• Reading and writing

  Mar 8

  The little flurry of quotes that I’ve shared over the past week was both a way to ease myself back into writing here, and a pointer to the diversity of… more ›

• Zadie Smith on perfectibility

  Mar 7

  ‘I am a citizen as well as an individual soul and one of the things citizenship teaches us, over the long stretch, is that there is no perfectibility in human… more ›

• Jay Griffiths on art and healing

  Mar 6

  ‘Art comprehends us – it is through language that we are understood – and poetry, above all, steps into the heart and saturates it with understanding. Whenever I read poetry… more ›

• Pierre Le Coz on medical ethics

  Mar 5

  ‘To highlight the ethical component of their reflection process, participants can methodically organise their deliberations by referring to four internationally recognised standards of biomedical ethics: respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence,… more ›