As the three of us, Sassenachs all, walked the first two stages of the Rob Roy Way, we read Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy (well, two of us did). It’s a fine combination that I recommend to…

It’s around 10pm and I’m being driven back through Dhaka from a generous dinner with six scientists. We had plenty of good red wine to drink. We stop at a junction, and I see just ahead of us a rag…

“The Greatest Benefit to Mankind – A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present” by Roy Porter was published in 1999. It’s a magnificent 848-page book that I’ve now read. Many …

When you enter the room in the Louvre that contains the Mona Lisa you find people crowded around the bullet-proof case that contains the Mona Lisa and largely ignoring the other paintings in the ro…

I read an article by Hilary Mantel urging everybody to read Elizabeth Jane Howard, did so, and entered a treasure trove. I’ve already written something on The Long View (marvellous) and After Juliu…

“They drove past fields of wheat with poppies and fields of hops that were nearly ripe, through woods of oak and Spanish chestnut and lanes whose high banks were thick with wild strawberries …

People have been walking the Ridgeway for 5000 years. The Greater Ridgeway runs from Lyme Regis in the South West of England to Hunstanton on the East Anglia Coast. Viking armies used it to invade …

I read this book–a catalogue to accompany an exhibition at MOMA (the first time they had an exhibition of an artist dead for more than a century)–because Andrew Graham-Dixon called it t…

We all have moments in our lives that are turning points that would take our lives in different directions. (I remember listening to Bible readings at school about the stony path of righteousness a…

I read the passage below that describes wild Highlanders in Glasgow at the start of the 18th century in Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy and immediately thought of Queretaro in Mexico, where our son an…

A Nature investigation reveals a network of organizations that have been building their ranks through deceptive practices.

David Abulfia describes in the Great Sea the multitude of groups and cities that rose, fell, and disappeared in the Eastern Mediterranean between 1200 and 1500 BC—before written history began. Than…

This is a beautifully simple poem of eight lines in two stanzas that is beautifully constructed. The first three lines in each stanza rhyme (and simple rhymes they are: sky, lie, die; and me, be, s…

I came across this account of Ivan Illich’s idea on a different kind of politics in “Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey” by David Cayley. Illich invokes three axes that we should consider when ta…

This morning I posted an extract of my friend Murray Enkin’s summary of Myth from the Ice Age to Mickey Mouse by Robert W Brockway that the myth of progress is our dominant modern myth. It made me …

The Abstract Expressionist exhibition at the Royal Academy is powerful. You come out stunned as you do from a great cathedral, a brilliant concert, or a frightening or exultant experience. “I paint…

Everybody, my Polish friend tells me, should have a best friend, somebody to whom they can say everything. This is a Polish idea, “although it could be Russian or something else as well.” My friend…

Mentions of the menopause in British daily papers increased seven-fold between 2001 and 2021 and have, I’m sure, increased still further since. The word occurs almost every day on the radio, wherea…

“The Greatest Benefit to Mankind – A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present” by Roy Porter was published in 1999. It’s a magnificent 848-page book that I’ve now read. Many …

In this painting by Rubens that we saw in the National Gallery in Copenhagen a disturbingly young and female looking King Solomon is making the judgement that made him famous. The two prostitutes i…

Frieze Masters is an upscale art fair that happens in a large tent in Regent’s Park once a year. The tent contains three expensive restaurants, stylish toilets, an auditorium, a bookshop, and…

Reading and associations with brain health, cognition, well-being, and mental health - Volume 56

Can you unravel the meaning of this painting? It’s not that hard, but I didn’t succeed when Chicken asked me to try. It’s a painting by Otto van Veen that hangs in the National Ga…

Today—a special day, 14 October 2016—I finally finished the 3700 pages of Marcel Proust’s of In Search of Lost Time. Ironically as this is the great book about time and memory, I can’t remember exa…

I may be going slightly (or very) mad, but I’ve composed yet another letter of complaint. I feel like David fighting Goliath except that I know that this is a battle where David never even manages …

Mahler write his Ninth Symphony, which he never heard performed, in1909-10. At the time he wrote the symphony there was much suffering in his life. Maria, his eldest daughter, had died of scarlet f…

I both enjoyed and admired Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, which is why I posted a blog about it on the BMJ website: I also took so many quotes from from the book, many of them used in my…

The concept of a “late style”—where the artist relaxes, contemplates death, no longer cares what people think, is comfortable to neglect the market, shares the wisdom of old age, and produces remar…

I’d never heard of Rachel Cusk until I read a review of her latest book. I was intrigued and went back to read one of her earlier books. She writes about people she meets in a powerful and detailed…

I’m on page 783 of Bertrand Russell’s 789-page History of Western Philosophy that I was given as a prize at school in 1968. Reading the book has been a long, fascinating, and sometimes, I must conf…

What do I remember? A video of the artist, a young woman, walking through famous tourist sites with her eyes closed and pantomime eyes painted on her eyelids. She is not seeing in places where peop…

The actor and director Phelim McDermott certainly knows how to tell a story and put on a show, but did the magnificent Tao of Glass have a message or an argument? Mildly stunned after the performan…

I don’t speak any German, but German culture is enormously important to me, particularly the music of Bach, Hayden, Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner, the writing of Mann, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, …

Chicken and I made our way yesterday along the Regent’s Canal, stopping to watch two boats go through the lock and then help close the gates, to the Art Space Gallery to see Nick Miller’s series of…

Chicken and I made our way yesterday along the Regent’s Canal, stopping to watch two boats go through the lock and then help close the gates, to the Art Space Gallery to see Nick Miller’s series of…

I took this list of things to doubt from Erich Fromm’s introduction to Ivan Illich’s book “Celebration of Awareness.” Fromm (1900-1980) was a German-American social psychologist, sociologist, and h…

One of my associations with Finland is that it has the highest standards in school education, but Kari doesn’t seem convinced that it’s necessarily the achievement it seems. Finland does so …

I should have been at the Proms last night as well as tonight. Instead, we’ve gone to Winchester. Last night I should have been seeing a celebration of English music, but instead I was eating fried…

What happened with Finland in the Second World War? I realise with some embarrassment that I don’t know. Kari fills me in, reminding me, true scientist that he is, that he may be biased. Finl…

This is the third collection of poems inspired by grief that I have read in the past three years. Tennyson’s Memoriam had a richness I loved but could barely grasp. Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad is n…

Granddaughter: When will you go to the shop for a roll? Grandfather:  At about 8. Granddaughter: How long is that from now? Grandfather:  About an hour and a quarter. When do you go to sc…

While in Helsinki I learn a useful political lesson about a right wing, nationalistic party called (in Finnish, of course) ”True Finns.” My left wing friend is more amused than offended by th…

About 8% of the Finnish population speak Swedish as their first language. They all speak Finnish, but a doctor described to me his irritation with a patient who insisted on the consultation being i…

I wrote the first two paragraphs of this blog two weeks ago when the British Prime minister was coming under great pressure to block the early release of two prisoners. He’s since agreed not only n…

Finland has five million people and over two million saunas. “The Finns are crazy about saunas,” other Scandinavians have told me. Sauna defines Finland. Sauna is one of the few Finnish words to ma…

I don’t often shed tears when I read, but I shed tears twice at the end of Walter Scott’s novel “Waverley”—once in the scene below and once in the scene that follows when the Englishman Edward Wave…

I’ve read The Bell Jar,  and I admire the poetry of Silvia Plath (1932-63). But I haven’t read all of Ariel, and a series of radio programmes has introduced me to poems that I didn’t know, includin…