THE GOOD MAN JESUS AND THE SCOUNDREL CHRIST
There is an interesting piece of New Testament apocrypha called The Acts of Thomas. Thomas, otherwise known as Didymus, (from the Greek for twin), otherwise known as Judas, is the twin brother of Jesus.
The text is a Gnostic one, and Gnosticism was the seductive heresy that the evolving early Christian Church worked hard to suppress. Pre-Christian in origin, Gnosticism is a doctrine of dualism that allows for an untainted spirit and a corrupted body.
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Sheila Rowbotham - Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the 20th Century
As we go to the Polls it is worth reflecting that women over thirty were only given the vote in 1918 - providing they were either householders or married to a householder. Suffrage on equal terms with men didn't happen until 1928.
We have had only one female Prime Minister, and the majority of MPs are men, even though women are now 52% of the population.
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OUTSIDE OF A DOG. Rick Gekoski, published by Constable. Reviewed by JW in Times, August 23 2009.
Rick Gekoski has spent his life travelling by book. He set out as a little boy with Doctor Seuss's Horton Hatches The Egg, and found there his life-long love of things that are big, (Horton is an elephant), as well as a better-than-Freud way to read his parents' marriage: Horton is reliable, wiling and patient, if a little too placid. Mayzie is the flighty bird who would rather be on the coast than egg-brooding in a tree. 'My father was that sort of elephant, and my mother was that sort of bird.'
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CAN YOU MOVE DIAGONALLY? Jeanette Winterson interviews Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy
Carol Ann Duffy is the nation's favourite poet after Shakespeare. 'Poetry is our national art', she tells me in her garden outside Manchester. Then she says, 'I've got bird shit on my jumper.' She gets up to find a cloth and turns back: 'Shall we have a glass of champagne?'
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An exploration of seminal novelist Italo Calvino, through his writing
The wild inventions of the Italian writer are the wellspring of 21st-century fiction
At the end of Calvino's novella The Baron in the Trees, Guido, who travels only from tree to tree, and never comes down from the world he prefers to the world that presses its claims, finds himself near death. A host of noisome courtiers and curious peasants swarm under the canopy of the forest, waiting for him to submit to gravity's insistence.
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Alice Oswald: A Sleepwalk on the Severn
When I sat down to read A Sleepwalk on the Severn, I immediately got up again, and began to read out loud, on my feet. Half way through I went outside and finished reading the poem in the porch.
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Why books seem shockproof against change.
Where to begin when this is the end?
There were so many more columns to write - starting with the linguistic mis-fires we all love. My neighbour, (the one who speaks of death as 'giving up the goat'), warned me on New Years Day that things this year would be even more 'dubbed down.' I like that, with its notion of intelligent life translated into baffling cinema-speak - those movies we wander into late at night in a foreign city, understanding nothing except for the sex and violence.
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The bridges are being broken
This moanin I downlowded mI e-buk witch woz Grate Expektashuns, but I culdnt unnnerstan the Inglish.
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The small bookshop where you are always welcome is an essential part of life
I was in Paris last week for my birthday, and the Rentree was just beginning to happen; the sand was swept up from the banks of the Seine, and the little artisan boulangeries were baking again.
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Summer Reading
English summers make me feel sentimental and bucolic. There is something very Famous Five about cycling along country lanes with a bottle of lemonade and a ham sandwich, and of course, the right book in your knapsack.
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