Rowan Williams is the former Archbishop of Canterbury.
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To mark the celebration of the Annunciation (‘Lady Day’, 25 March), a friend sends me an image of her favourite picture of the angel’s appearance to the Virgin Mary – a painting by the African-American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, who worked mostly in France in the first decades of the last century. Mary is a
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If it is true that a serious artist is one with the capacity to go on reinventing who they are in their work, Leonard Cohen unquestionably counts as serious. Not that anyone is likely to think of him as frivolous, exactly. While the famously acid description of his songs as ‘music to slit your wrists
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Two attacks in local villages, leaving 17 dead in one and eight in another, says my teacher friend from Kaduna State in Nigeria in one of his latest letters. He writes regularly about the threats that he and his family and students face from Islamist militias. But what stays in my mind, apart from the
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Readers of Anthony Trollope will remember how thoughtless and greedy young men in the Victorian professions can be lured into ruin by accepting ‘accommodation bills’ from their shifty acquaintances. They make themselves liable for the debts of others; and only too late do they discover that they are trapped in a web of financial mechanics