First published in The Porch Magazine In memory of my dear friend and colleague, DAVID DRYSDALE, who inspires me daily to embrace who I am and live life as a gift. I FIRST met David Drysdale in the year of my 40th birthday, at a time when being a man still felt to me like a…
A STORY OF FAITH AND SEPARATION
The novelist Michel Faber talks about his new book, his Evangelical background, atheism, and the loss of his wife.
ARRIVING to interview Michel Faber, I feel awestruck and slightly puzzled.
In National Adoption Week, NICK THORPE reflects on the most challenging and fulfilling experience of his life… MONTHS before we met our son for the first time, I knew in my gut that I wanted to be his dad. The description from the social worker chimed for both of us: “A lively, sociable three-year-old with…
The problem with our society is not that it values material things too much but that it doesn’t value them enough FROM AEON MAGAZINE On my desk stands a miniature of an Easter Island moai, carved for me by a Rapa Nui craftsman. It’s precious to me, hewn from the same stone his ancestors used for…
RENATO Cardenas lives alone in a bleached wooden house, shielded by pine trees and the kind of mysterious smile you might expect from a wizard. Not that he will admit to being a wizard. “I’ve heard that people call me El Brujo Cardenas,” is all he will concede, tantalisingly, as he ushers us inside, amusement twitching…
Great to see John Rae finally getting the recognition he deserves on his 200th birthday. Never heard of him? Me neither, until I came across the story of Britain’s most undervalued Arctic explorer a few years ago in Orkney. Born in Stromness, Dr Rae’s accomplishments tower above those of many of his more famous Victorian…
You’ve probably never heard of Sir John Crofton, but if you value your lungs, you should certainly toast him. It was Crofton, half a century ago, who discovered the first 100 per cent cure for the age-old scourge of tuberculosis. Crofton, too, who pioneered the global method currently being used to fight terrifying new drug-resistant…
WATCHING the vast and emotional crowds at the funeral of Hugo Chavez today reminded me of the last time I was in Venezuela – when the masses took to the streets for a very different reason. It was April 2002 and I was heading for the Orinoco delta to write an eco-tourism feature for the…
Watch Nick’s talk on YouTube Romania’s Palace of the Parliament is designed to intimidate. Twelve stories tall, with 1,100 rooms decked in a million cubic meters of Transylvanian marble, it was originally built by the Ceaușescu regime at a cost of 3 billion euros. I first took a tour of its vast, echoing halls about ten…
One of my favourite books of 2011 was Jeanette Winterson’s memoir Why be Happy When you Could be Normal? So I was delighted to get the opportunity to interview her recently for Third Way Magazine. Anyone familiar with her award-winning Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, in either its novel or BBC TV serial format, will…
