Sublime

When I did socialise, it was with people I’d met in New York; and two of them were to become very important in my life. The first was a management consultant called Nick Walt, whom I met at a party; he worked with the Boston Consulting Group, although he was from a different Boston, in Lincolnshire. He was insanely polite and overbearingly consider

But the Church wasn’t Blake’s only target. He found the same passion for order among scientists, their need to mansplain everything squeezing the mystery and magic out of the universe. He longed for them . . . To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour

The “No Popery” force became the crowd if it never became the people. It was, perhaps, increasingly an urban crowd, and was subject to those epidemics of detailed delusion with which sensational journalism plays on the urban crowds of to–day.

After a few minutes of conversation in which I established most easily my moral superiority over this degenerate, I found myself pondering once more the crises of our times.

‘I haven’t found my faith,’ said Dines between bites. ‘I wonder where I put it?’ ‘But isn’t this faith?’ said Thomas, tugging at the fringed stole, noting that it could do with a clean. ‘Doesn’t an attempt at faith constitute faith itself? It’s a dreadful thing to confuse faith with certainty.’

the cover design for Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers is, very satisfyingly, half finished: