Nick Spencer

3 weeks ago | thetablet.co.uk | Nick Spencer

I speak to Jonathan Sumption in the kind of the room I would like to be resurrected in. We’re in the small, elegant study on the ground floor of his late seventeenth-century detached house overlooking Greenwich Park in London. Sunlight scatters across the erudite volumes that grace the shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling. Even the loo is book-lined, biographies of Bach, Mendelssohn and the 29 volumes of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians laid out for curious privy-goers.

4 weeks ago | spectator.com.au | Nick Spencer

Noah and the Flood in Western Thought Cambridge University Press, pp.407, 35 ‘They put the behemoths in the hold along with the rhinos, the hippos and the elephants. It was a sensible decision to use them as ballast, but you can imagine the stench.’ So begins Julian Barnes’s quirky novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, through which the story of Noah and the flood flows like an underground river.

1 month ago | spectator.co.uk | Nick Spencer

‘They put the behemoths in the hold along with the rhinos, the hippos and the elephants. It was a sensible decision to use them as ballast, but you can imagine the stench.’ So begins Julian Barnes’s quirky novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, through which the story of Noah and the flood flows like an underground river. As Philip C. Almond shows in this impressively erudite book, the tale courses through two millennia of western thought with similar power.

1 month ago | churchtimes.co.uk | Nick Spencer

IN THIS section last week, Canon Rod Garner gave some clarity to that opaque and divisive word “woke” (Analysis, 7 March). He did so in the context of the recent Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference, which sought to criticise “wokery” in defence of the West and its “Judaeo-Christian” heritage. That word — “Judaeo-Christian” — so often encountered in the company of Big Serious Nouns (“heritage”, “culture”, “civilisation”, “values”) merits equal attention.

1 month ago | thetablet.co.uk | Nick Spencer

Features: The Great OvercorrectionThe internationalisation of judgments has added a sense of distance between citizens and the law they are mandated to obey. The consequence has been a growing sense that the rule of law is somehow acting against “the people”. The “vibe” was due for a shift. But what we are seeing is an instinctive and hazardous lurch into the lane on the other side.