How did Weimar, the town of Goethe and Schiller, become the crucible of Germany's moral collapse? I speak to Katja Hoyer about her new book, Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. audioboom.com/posts/890048...

Set down your quill! Take up your iPod 120GB! And read Alastair Benn’s account of how to navigate the borderlands between our imagination (Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘kaleidoscopes of changing pictures, echoes of the past’) and the elusive present moments of our modernity:

And he’s in the curling finals! (This video is lovely)

Our algorithms are trimming our very souls: read this salutary meditation on the modern world, & don’t forget: no Bildung, no Bildungsroman + no Mignon: Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht…

“Let’s have more pirates,” they said. Throw in how Shakespeare’s close reading of pre-Existentialist Montaigne informed “To be or not to be” (thus dragging Hamlet out of a Jonsonian Revenge Tragedy and into a colder, more modern world) & this pod becomes essential (& greatly enjoyable) listening:

Read this! I loved BB’s self-deprecating description of her distinctive topknot as ‘choucroute’ / Sauerkraut - a wonderful article bringing back many happy boyhood screen daydreams ⚜️🇫🇷

@bennrobin.bsky.social 🌷

"A commercial for Carte D’Or ice cream I would have been very pleased to have written." - Alan Bennett

We're all set for our Midsummer Concert this evening at Canongate Kirk. It was sounding fantastic this morning. Tickets are still available at TicketSource until 5pm and any remaining will be available on the door £15 (£13) U18Free www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on/edi...

This is part of a thing called "The Last Picnic", which didn't make it into The Usual Apologies, but is part of a series of hybrid splurges of consciousness tentatively entitled Postcards From An Edge. Buy TUA, show me, and I will send you a hand drawn postcard from an edge. #Poetry #BribeOrThreat

Do read this! From Robert Louis Stevenson to Numberwang, via Croydon, Slough and Hackney, to the emergence of a new, and gentle, seam of English pastoral comedy (Mackenzie Crook’s The Detectorists and Will Sharpe’s Flowers) that helps glimpse life’s mysteriousness:

A really great podcast. Listen out for Tallis, Mozart, Wagner, Ted Heath(!) +reflections on the sad sidelining of <élitist> classics, compared with the real joys of music making for all: playing the cello, singing in choirs, conducting youth orchestras, playing Solti’s Ring Cycle on a 60s phonogram…

Is George Smiley the still-abiding spirit of the post-war era, and does spy fiction help us to parse our new/old world and its actors? Your conclusions will be thoroughly enlivened by this podcast, with both David Omand (not C, but nearly) and Pauline Blistène:

Thank you, @bennrobin.bsky.social! Goodness knows how much we all need re-enchantment. And chant/chanson too.

As @murielzagha.bsky.social writes, it is often (especially on Mondays) “as though the medium of chanson is used to disrupt and re-enchant the ordinariness of everyday life and its tiresome repetitiveness”. Happy reading (& listening - some wonderful links):

The ‘note of civet is evaporating from our cultural life’ remarks Jenny McCartney - catch it (if that’s the right word) while you can in this fascinating essay, along with pungent doses of Hogarth, Zola and Sickert:

A most literate (& elegantly alarming) exposition of the post- or even anti-literate era we appear to be entering: do listen (and/or watch!):

The great Andrew Wilton’s tour d’horizon of a century of printmaking and his insights into the abiding and dynamic influence of Turner himself on the course of this mechanical art are very much worth reading:

Wonderful story. Deservedly on the front page.

This is a picture of Dylan as Goethe’s greatest wanderer, Chaucer’s man in the crowd, who sees everything and sets out to tell us all the condition of each one of us. Do read this (before seeing the excellent film) by @alastairbenn.bsky.social at the ever-more-essential @engelsbergideas.bsky.social

No other living artist has so successfully and for so long lit up the vastness of the American experiment as Bob Dylan, as an ambitious, knowing biopic reveals. My latest for @engelsbergideas.bsky.social: engelsbergideas.com/reviews/bob-...

The public's appetite for intellectual stimulation is now being met by podcasts. The risks to the written word may prove existential. My latest for @engelsbergideas.bsky.social: engelsbergideas.com/notebook/pod...

Some carols from last night's service @scotparl.bsky.social 🎶 @caltonconsort.bsky.social

Do come on 14th December (this Saturday already!). Also, do like the choir’s page for news of lots more choral delights in the New Year:

This is a brilliant article - typical of the excellent (& paywall free) content at @engelsbergideas.bsky.social

A picture taken seven years ago. A merchant's and shipper's office in Leith, Edinburgh. Gone now.

If you're like me, #TheArchers lone fan in your house, under 80 and a tiny bit mental, you'll LOVE @thecidershedpod.bsky.social with that "nasty" woman and the ascorbic man. Just kidding, they're bloody lovely humans -the sort you'd want a pint with.

‘Robin’ Artist: Ronald Lampitt (Birds and how they Live, 1965)