A few years back I wrote an article about Lu Zhengxiang , the Chinese Prime Minister who, after leading the Chinese delegation to the ...

With events to commemorate the start of the Great War underway across the world, the BBC have produced this feature on Tolkien and the w...

Alice McDermott recently spoke about being a novelist and a Catholic . It's pretty short and you might end up hitting your head against ...

With the news that Tolkien's translation of Beowulf is about to be published (see article here ), I thought it might be worth retur...

It's difficult to find good book lists. Either they're too long or they go into a huge amount of detail. So I was delighted to find ...

Oasis Journal  (from Cardinal Scola's Oasis Foundation ) is a real find. It's a great read and it's also a great-looking jo...

"Most modern history, especially in England, suffers from the same imperfection as journalism. At best it only tells half of the histo...

There are times when the outsiders' perspective leaves the reader with a sense of being slightly short-changed, but there are also ...

Shirley Hughes is best known for her Alfie books for toddlers but she recently wrote a book for older children which is well worth readi...

Forget the play. Forget the film. Forget, if you can, the songs. Read the book. It's great. And it's surprisingly innocent. ...

BBC Radio 4 begins a new dramatisation of Dante's Divine Comedy today  at 3pm UK time. It's asking a lot to dramatise it in 3 one-ho...

I realise this might sound like special pleading because one of them mentions my talk in Oxford on Saturday but Stratford Caldecott has a p...

While I'm on the topic of Radio 3, I thought I'd mention this week's series of programmes about Forgiveness . On Friday it ...

There was an interesting discussion about Venezuela during BBC Radio 3's Music Matters programme yesterday. Since this blog deals ...

According to the Poetry Foundation's useful website , the poet and novelist Claude McKay "continues to be associated with the ...

Second Spring is holding its second Interfaith Colloquium at St Benet's Hall, Oxford on Saturday 1st March from 2-5pm. There are going...

Jeremy Irons is going to be reading possibly the greatest poems of the 20th Century, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets , for BBC Radio 4 on Sat...

I bought my first car, a Citroen 2CV, from Millom, a post-industrial town on the Cumbrian coast. A car like no other bought in a pl...

Discussions of Catholic literature don't usually start (or end) with Toni Morrison but, according to John N. Duvall in The Identifying ...

You can tell things are going well when your students start teaching you. One of my students recently introduced me to this essay on ' ...

With the 50th anniversary of C.S. Lewis's death approaching later this week, it is extremely heartening to see that his work is beginni...

With the Prix Goncourt , France's most prestigious literary prize, due to be awarded in the next few days, I thought it might be worth ...

The US National Book Awards finalists have just been announced and among them is Gene Luen Yang  in the Young People's Literature secti...

Fr Tim Finigan has posted a link to this interview  with Evelyn Waugh on his blog. It's full of wonderful one-liners, mainly because he ...

The novel is the genre of our age, so much so that other forms of writing are often quietly ignored. However, it was not all that long ag...

I have just read a remarkable book, And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran. Lusseyran was blinded in a childhood accident but "...

... is the title of an interesting article written recently by Mark Brumley, the president and CEO of Ignatius Press. To read it click here ...

I was in the happy position of attending a short lecture last week by Dr Gillian Woods from Birkbeck College, University of London, about ...

... is not my question but Toby Garfitt's in the journal, French Studies .  Dr Garfitt is a very interesting writer. An academic ...

A new school opened in London yesterday, The Cedars School in Croydon. I am not an unbiased observer as I work there but I have to say ...

A reader wrote this in the combox the other day: "You ought you know to refer to your self as Roman Catholic, as there are other churc...

Yesterday was the saints' day of Augustine Zhao Rong and companions , many of whom were martyred during the Boxer Rising at the sta...

Please Look After Mother  is a novel that demands attention. It has been translated into over twenty languages, has sold over 2 millio...