Nick Page

An unexpected consequence of the rise of e-books and online newspaper reading: a lack of toilet roll. According to this story in the Torygraph, “After coming to depend on readers to dutifully recycle their old periodicals, paper manufacturers are now finding that supplies of high-quality paper for recycling are becoming scarce.” And that means less [...]

And so we get to the big bombshell of the election and it’s this: Gordon Brown said something nasty about someone when he thought she wasn’t listening. Good grief. Is that it? Is that really what will decide this election? It’s a curious thing but for most of history ordinary people have assumed – rightly [...]

Happy Saint George’s Day! I mean, yes, he was actually a Turkish soldier under the Emperor Diocletian, who died in Syria. And, yes, all the myths about him are entirely spurious. But he’s our spuriously mythed-up Turkish soldier martyred under the Emperor Diocletian who died in Syria. (Well I say, ‘our’, he’s also the patron [...]

Been away for the past week, down on the south coast including a visit to the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu – which only the English would pronounce ‘Bewley’. Loved these promotional shaped vehicles. I mean, who wouldn’t want to drive round London in an orange?

Why bank bonuses truly are an issue of morality. Goldman Sachs clearly thought they were exercising heroic self-denial by awarding themselves a compensation pool amounting to a mere $16.2 billion. Haiti’s total GDP is $7 billion, and even before the earthquake one child in eight died before its fifth birthday; imagine Goldman turning over half [...]

‘He was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures’ When it comes to the resurrection accounts, there is a tendency to look down on the first Christians, to dismiss them as superstitious, credulous, simple folk who didn’t know any better. But they were far better acquainted with [...]

One of my favourite artists is Jordi Savall, the Catalan viol player, who compiles wonderful CDs around historic themes, and packages them with gorgeous, fascinating books. (I’ve just got his new one – The Forgotten Kingdom – about the Cathars in the south of France) His album Jerusalem is a wonderful evocation of the history [...]

Chagall: White Crucifixion. Chagall painted this astonishing picture in 1938. The Nazi pogroms had started, two years before Guernica had been bombed. Although he was Jewish, Chagall frequently painted the crucifixion. Indeed, the Jewishness is what is remarkable here: Christ is clad, not in a loincloth, but in a Jewish prayer shawl; surrounded by images [...]

The Grauniad has a photo gallery of Holy Week processions around the world, including a huge number of Spanish pentitents wearing large pointy hoods.(There’s an older set of pictures here.) There’s another fascinating gallery here. Some of the penitent/flagellant stuff is on the morbid side of extreme, but we do well to remind ourselves that [...]

I’m a big fan of maps. Maps don’t just tell you where places are, they tell you where it’s possible to go. They can give you the direction, in all sorts of ways. On the Thursday and Friday of the last week of his life, Jesus, according to the accounts in the gospels, made several [...]