Bruce Charlton's Notions

Sir John Fenwick's the flower amang them  (variously titled) is a lovely, yearning air in 3/4 time, which I often used to play to myself...

It strikes me that different people want very different things from their religion - or (more often nowadays) their ideology*.  Many people ...

Virtue in traditional Christianity, indeed in traditional religion, is about obedience to external deity - service to the will of a deity. C...

Much as with UFOs ; I have read a fair bit about ET contacts (and viewed documentaries or videos); and various of my penfriends have describ...

There are individual exceptions either way; but for an animal to be magical or not, doesn't correlate with whether that beast is good or...

We have long had a family tradition of making a question or statement from peoples' names as with: Does Melvyn Bragg?  Is Anthony Strong...

Romantic and Christian - both are needed.  Christianity comes first, because it is the structure of reality. But without Romanticism... wel...

Faery  by John T Kruse - 2020 Over at The Notion Club Papers blog ; I discuss how very different were JRR Tolkien's elves from those of...

Sun rising due east:  Note * I have always supposed that on the day of the spring equinox (i.e. yesterday) the name and night both became 12...

" Deus ex machina " is a term used to describe the plot device by which intervention from outside the action appears just before s...

The main source of mass media disinformation is in the frame. No matter whether any specific claim is factual or a lie, we can be sure that...

Monarchy was a TV series by historian David Starkey from twenty years ago , which I am re-watching for about the third time.  The series ru...

When I recently wrote about the severe and increasing subfertility of the populations of all developed societies in the world; I had not rea...

As a Northumbrian (by inheritance, conception, and residence - if not birth!) who yet has a better claim to pretend to be Irish than most of...

Over the past eight years; my reading-of and brooding-on the Fourth Gospel (called "John") has had many and profound effects on m...

An interesting and useful resource has appeared on the excellent Fourble website: a collection of 45  podcasts featuring or written by Coli...

I thought regular readers might be interested to see the official document by which I became Baron of Jesmond , some three decades ago.  Thi...

John Pritchard, Tragedian: 1830-1868  Seems to have been a rather handsome chap, and rather too obviously proud of it - given that this is t...

The problems of this mortal life are (essentially) evil and entropy . Those who are honest and give the matter thought, acknowledge that the...

2020 was the year when there was a completely successful coup in which global-totalitarianism took-over all the nations of the world; conclu...

The vast and endless stream of drivel on the subject of the supernatural superpowers of "AI" continues - and it will continue unti...