Section 5: The Death of Tragedy: Tragedy has had a long history and has always been, and indeed continues to be, of great cultural significance.  Who has not heard of Shakespeare ?  Even my own mother, who left school when she was 15 in 1932 had studied Julius Caesar (not ranked as a trage...

Section: Mr Nobody: With this heading I am reminded of the famous song of The Beatles from the 1960s called Nowhere Man . The opening lyrics of this famous song, written by the late John Lennon , are: He's a real nowhere Man, Sitting in his Nowhere Land, Making all his nowhere plans for nobody. Does...

Section 4: Heidegger’s Humanism: Heidegger, like Nietzsche before him, was an unbeliever or atheist who could not give up Christian hopes.  According to Gray , and one is wont to believe him, carried along with the author’s enthusiasm and logic, that Heidegger’s terminology is merely new ...

Chapter 2 of John Gray’s book is divided into 15 subsections. Section 1: At The Masked Ball In popular psychology we read about all the different masks we wear as we go about our daily business, e.g., that of parent, teacher, bus driver, patient, student or whatever, and, indeed, we change those m...

Many years ago when this author was at college he had a wonderful director for his master’s thesis, one Rev Dr. Brian McNamara, S.J .  Brian was an inspiration as he taught me how to read with an extra edge, or, if you prefer with purpose and focus.  He was a wonderful scholar to whom I ...

I remember my mother quoting one line from Shakespeare to us as children.  Now she had left school at 13 or so years of age because that was the practice for poor children in Ireland in 1930.  Imagine they had read several Shakespearean plays in primary school before they were 13!  An...

For those of you interested in the magic of words there are a few interesting sites worth your perusal - (i) Ask Oxford which is a wonderful site run by the OUP people.  Here is the link: Ask Oxford, and (ii) an equally interesting and authoritative site – called AWAD - from which one can get...

This post is going to be a short review of three films under the above title.  The three films are (i) Defiance, (ii) The Wrestler and (iii) Frost-Nixon, all three of which I have viewed in the past several weeks.  Of the three The Wrestler is fictional while the other two are fact, though...

I remember years ago when I was in fifth and sixth year in secondary school the school librarian telling us that history was a most essential subject because it taught us to review the past so that we should not make the same mistakes again.  He also informed us that no matter what subject we w...

For today's post I'm still processing the insights I gained from Alain De Botton's wee book  The Art of Travel.  In chapter 5, suitably called "On The Country and the City" he tours The Lake District (Cumbria) in the company of the quintessential nature poet - Romantic poet - Wil...