Pen to Paper – Occasional Essays

This book is an attempt at a species of literature which I think has not hitherto had justice done to it, but which I believe to be capable of great things – I mean Philosophical Romance … Let us try to catch something of the skill of the great masters of Romance and let us unite to it the most serious thoughts and speculations which have stirred mankind … It is an attempt to blend together these three things in one philosophy: the memory of the dead; the life of thought; the life of each one of us alone. Amid the tangled web of life’s story I have endeavoured to trace some distinct threads…

Siegfried Sassoon was one of that small number of poets whose names became permanently associated with the Great War. The others included Rupert Brook, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves. Brook, Owen and Rosenberg died in the war, while Sassoon, Blunden and Graves survived. Graves became a prolific writer in a multitude of fields and a revered public figure. Sassoon continued to write, achieving fame for his series of fictionalised autobiographies, known collectively as the Sherston memoirs, evoking the England of the pre-war years and of the war itself. He also…

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Henry James: great names in philosophy and literature, the first from the very early years of the nineteenth century, the second from the very last years. Hegel was the deep and complex German philosopher who constructed a far-reaching and systematic analysis of God, nature, mankind and history. James was the author of almost twenty full-length novels and over fifty short stories, all depicting the lives of wealthy, fastidious personalities, those who constituted the social elite of English and American society from the 1870s to the end of the cen…

Some years ago I became seriously interested in Hinduism, a religion that differs in many important ways from the Western Judaeo-Christian tradition. That tradition is dominated by the concept of a personal God as creator and ruler of the universe, and of mankind’s destiny as unfolding under the power and authority of God, who is believed to act in history, to intervene directly in human life. The imperfections and sufferings of humanity are explained as arising from mankind’s sinful nature, which can be healed only by following the divine example of a saviour-god, Jesus Christ, as interpre…

Russian Expansion into Neighbouring Territories 200 Years AgoEuropean anxieties about Russia have a long history. This map appeared in the 1887 edition of Stanford’s London Atlas, but it goes back even further, for it was originally drawn to illustrate Sir John MacNeill’s book, The Progress and Present Position of Russia, published in 1836. MacNeill’s knowledge had come from his time as British envoy to Tehran, and his book was a polemical work warning against Russian expansionism. It evidently struck a nerve in Victorian England. Mistrust of Russia became a deep and continuing theme in Bri…