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Source: Hugo Talks Read the original article here: https://hugotalks.com …
How political was Jesus?
Blaise Pascal is right to have jotted in one of his baroque notebooks that Jesus lived “in such obscurity… that historians writing of important matters of state hardly noticed him”. And Erich Auerbach is right to have stressed in a …
Have yourself a countercultural Christmas
In Lapland, just inside the Arctic Circle, you can visit Santa Claus at any time of year, because that’s where he lives. No doubt this requires a plentiful supply of Santas (I hope nobody under the age of seven is …
Britain is haunted by Dickensian ghosts
In the Celtic fringes of Europe, the idea of “thin places” persists — locations where the boundary between this reality and others is claimed to be at its most fragile, even permeable. Originally, these were seen as portals to the …
Claire Keegan’s faithless Christmas Carol
Most modern Christmas “classics” look and feel as fake as a tinsel-draped plastic fir-tree. Though streaming services and Hollywood studios try to persuade us that their latest twist on the Elf who saved Christmas from the Grinch while Santa had …
Why we cling on to Christmas
In the strangest of times, the strangest of festivals. Dulled by familiarity, piled over with good food, buried in torn wrapping paper, drowned in good drink: can we see Christmas again for what it is?
In days that seem unprecedented, …
The myth of ‘pagan’ Christmas
In AD 932 the most powerful ruler in Britain spent Christmas on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Never before had a unitary kingdom been fashioned out of all the various realms of the Angles and the Saxons. Never before had …
There’s nothing wrong with a festive fight
Is your quasi-fascist uncle coming over for Christmas lunch? The one who drinks too much gin and loudly shares all his ghastly Seventies jokes about people’s skin colour and his reactionary opinions about women and domestic bliss. How close do …
Dickens hated Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens hated Oliver Twist. Rarely in English letters do we find a case of an author so embarrassed, so fundamentally ill at ease with his own creation. Oliver spends the first half of the novel crying, begging, whining, and …
