Steve_Bamlett_blog

What historical event fascinates you the most? Prompt – blog 3rd November 2023 Thomas Carlyle wrote a book on The French Revolution in three volumes in 1837. It contains a lot of words. The purpose of those words is to turn actions by people that occurred in France from 1789, although the book starts well … More ‘Consider it well, the Event, the thing which can be spoken of and recorded, is it not in all cases, some disruption, some solution of continuity’. Applying Thomas Carlyle to the Stonewall Riots.

In a review of a book of poems by Paul Muldoon in 2015 Fran Brearton in The Guardian writes that: ‘In a 21st-century context where everything seems instantly “knowable” for everyone, where we are “assailed by information”, what is “worth knowing” or what remains unknowable have become pressing questions. … The earth … is now also … More “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”: Beware those who claim that there is only thing you need to know.

Daily writing prompt: You have three magic genie wishes, what are you asking for The line of poetry in my title comes from Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes (read the poem from this link if you wish), a very specifically English eighteenth-century version of a satire by Juvenal. The story it tells so … More Why three wishes when even one is prone to: ‘The secret ambush of a specious pray’r”?

Forgive the doggerel. Much love goes with the wishful preaching! Steve

Today it was reported widely that the Israeli government has called for the resignation of the Secretary General of the United Nations (UN) for saying that, though the attacks on Israeli land and people killing an estimated 1400 were ‘appalling’ (as of course they were and more) they were not an event that happened in … More The ‘major’ events in history will turn out to be the ones we only half-understood at the time and were little publicised.