Category: Access

6

Free Content

21 May, 2018

Ransom Notes May 21: The Pope’s Theology of Evil

By

Pope Francis has once again managed to use a private conversation as an opportunity to make a heretical statement, reserving the right to take it back or fall back on issue clarification, should the storm of outrage prove to be too furious.  According to Juan Carlos Cruz, an alleged victim of clerical sexual abuse, the Pope told him : “Juan Carlos, that you are gay does not matter.“God made you like this and loves you like this and I don’t care.“The pope loves you like this. You have to be happy with who you are.” As a matter of course...

0

Free Content / Poetry

21 May, 2018

Poems of the Week, May 20: Omar Khayam

By

This is a brief section of Edward Fitzgerald’s famous rendering of the Rubaiyat by the Persian mathematician Omar Khayam   VII Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling: The Bird of Time has but a little way To flutter–and the Bird is on the Wing. VIII Whether at Naishapur or Babylon, Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run, The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one. IX Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say; Yes, but where leaves the Rose...

0

Free Content

16 May, 2018

Wednesday’s Child: This Portside of Paradise

By

When a Negroni cocktail is properly made, it is just the thing to drink sitting in the shade on a sunny day.  But when the humble Negroni is made with Punt e Mes instead of ordinary red vermouth, it is more than the cocktail you drink in the shade on a sunny day, it is how you set sail for paradise.

1

All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

3 May, 2018

Wednesday’s Child: Brownlow’s Razor, Part Two

By

In short, something like a late Romantic.  Had Pasternak been born in England, he would now be remembered as the culmination of Romanticism, a poet taking to modern extreme that “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” which, famously, Wordsworth mentions in the preface to Lyrical Ballads.  And politics, it would seem, had as little to do with any of this as automobile manufacturing or Olympic sports. Yet this was the same poet who, aged 41 in 1931, published an autobiography entitled Okhrannaya gramota, its title usually, and not incorrectly, translated into English as Safe Conduct.  In speaking of a man who,...