November 29th, 2009
Conspiracy mixes dangerously with fumes of port, clouds of snuff
For bedtime reading, I’ve recently been working my way through the (unintentionally?) hilarious published letters of late, lifelong Oxford don Hugh Trevor-Rover, who, as Lord Dacre, served as a grand — if not especially well-loved — Master of famously traditional Peterhouse, Cambridge. His private writings are undeniably fascinating, though — how should I put it [...]
November 19th, 2009
Salvador Dalí’s own painting “Vision of Hell” scared him to death
There is something about Spanish civilization that seems especially well-suited to turning out painters of genius. I’m not just thinking about the the great roll-call of old masters (Velázquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Goya, etc.), but also the likes of Salvador Dalí in more recent decades. He claimed that his partly Moorish and Arab remote ancestry [...]
November 10th, 2009
“Free as a bird,” one step ahead of this dreaded secret tribunal
As you know, Stephen, one of my regrets during the composition of the book was having to omit the Sacred Vehm. This was done, of course, on the grounds that its secret court sittings, at which the only sentence imposed was death, were held in the open air, so that finding precise locations today, to [...]
November 2nd, 2009
Dead Hand, Defcon3 and intimations of Doomsday
I always find Halloween rather kitschy and light on genuine spine chills. More seriously frightening are some recent Cold War-era revelations that show how close the world may have come to nuclear oblivion around the time I was enjoying a misspent youth watching Hogan’s Heroes on the telly (the original release of the show, not [...]