Simone Weil

In the sphere of British environmentalism, Paul Kingsnorth is admired as a maverick in thought and deed. Starting out as a journalist with the Ecologist magazine, he co-founded the Dark Mountain Project, an online portal devoted to stories about the more-than-human world in a time of ecological collapse. On resigning from both, he retreated as a self-proclaimed ‘recovering environmentalist’ to an Irish smallholding, where he has embraced the Romanian Orthodox church. Against the Machine, his tenth book, is billed as a summary of his intensifying disillusionment with events in the past 30 years. It is a serious work leavened with sardonic humour and is by turns rich in unsettling ideas

A hundred years ago, T.S. Eliot wrote to Geoffrey Faber, for whose publishing company he had just started work, complaining: ‘The Defence of the West… is a subject about which everyone thinks he has something to say.’ Plus ça change? Back then, people were coming to terms with a war that had shown the West to be neither as unified nor as civilised as had been assumed. A century on, American isolationism, demographic decline, mass immigration, Islamism and a slow but decisive shift in global economic gravity are giving commentators the opportunity to bloviate endlessly about the decline/suicide/end/decay/of the West. But what exactly it is that we are defending or

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer steeped in the solitude and ecstasy of Catholic mysticism: everything he wrote was dedicated to the greater glory of God. He was in thrall to the liturgical works of Stravinsky, but also to the percussive cling-clang of Javanese gamelan music and other eastern sonorities. His thirst for ‘un-French’ music sometimes put him at loggerheads with the Paris old guard who found him as fandangled and foreign as a pagoda. His ability to create new possibilities in sound was of course what made him modern. Messiaen was scarcely 20 when he wrote his hauntingly strange Préludes for piano in 1929 and the no less mysterious