Category: Books
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Getting High
OK, finally, after two years of writing, GETTING HIGH will be published mid-April 2016! It’s a book that’s been a long time in gestation. I actually finished a full draft a year ago. I’d also written and presented a 30 minute meditation on flight for BBC Radio 4, and in the course of that a…
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Good Friday | Book Review: ‘God is Unconscious’
I’ll cut to the chase: if you are at all interested in what theology is — and who we are as people interested in it — then you should read Tad Delay’s God is Unconscious. Go buy it here (UK) or here (US). It’s perhaps the ideal Good Friday read because it gets further to the heart…
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Writing Update
As you may know, for the past year I’ve been working on a major new book provisionally titled Getting High. It’s ostensibly a history of the long quest for flight, and uses the lens of the 1960s to examine how we have used drugs, religion and technology to achieve this goal. It’s been enormous fun to…
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‘You Will Not Surely Die’ | Art, Consciousness and Immortality
The above picture was going around Facebook the other day, posted I think as a kind of spiritual pick-me-up, an encouragement to live life to the full and get out there and create wonderful things. The problem is, it’s absolute bullsh*t of a rather pernicious and ancient sort. Your body will die, but you cannot…
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On Being Let Down: iPhone 6 and the Politics of Disappointment
So here we are. It is, as Stephen Fry put it, ‘most exquisite mobile ever made.’ It is thinner, faster, bigger, more clever and lasts longer. Except, if you keep it in your pocket it bends. Except, in a year or so it’ll seem slow, heavy, stupid, with a weak heart. Better to accept it:…
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To The Book – Reflections on Reading Tomes
Was talking books last night in a bar overlooking the Thames, and was reminded to come back to something I’d noted having finished Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. It’s such a large volume, but there was a lovely sense in reading the hardback of the gradual shift of weight, page by page, from the right hand…