Category Archives: Empathy

Humankindness

I’ve been listening to the 2025 BBC Reith Lectures, given by Rutger Bregman, the young Dutch historian who became an international sensation in 2019 after standing up at the Davos World Economic Forum and berating a room full of billionaires for … Continue reading

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Witness Blanket

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I recently watched a clip of a Native American elder in a wheelchair being jostled by New York police during a protest against ICE. Speaking to a reporter he said that it pained him to be there in a moment … Continue reading

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Dark Angels on Writing

Over the years I’ve come to believe that people are sometimes drawn to Dark Angels courses in answer to an unspoken, perhaps even unacknowledged, need. They may not know it but at the moment they hear about our programme there … Continue reading

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Across the great divide

I’m watching Debate Night, the new BBC Scotland channel’s answer to Question Time. It serves to underline a question I have been asking myself more and more frequently in recent months: how do we engage with people who hold diametrically … Continue reading

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The stories we tell

In the past month I’ve spent a week in Spain with a group of eight people on a The Stories We Tell course, and a week in the Northwest Highlands with a friend I’ve known for 45 years. At the … Continue reading

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Long division

A woman got onto the train the other day and sat down opposite me. She was fifty-ish, tanned and smartly dressed. She had come from the airport and was breathless. We chatted and I learned that she had been to … Continue reading

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Born storytellers

“We’re a narrative species,” said the scientist on Radio 4 the other day. “We understand the world in terms of stories.” He was talking about the MMR vaccine and how the stories of danger that have grown up around it … Continue reading

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Untold stories

If one is asked the same question often enough, no matter how difficult, one sooner or later comes up with an answer that can be given without too much further thought. It may not be precisely the right one, but … Continue reading

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Leaderology

Leadership. It’s a topic that exercises people in airless seminar rooms without number, up and down the country, every day of the week. Yet in its elevation to the status of a ‘-ship’ it becomes so far removed from the … Continue reading

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Nudge, nudge

Until yesterday I had never heard of the government’s Behavioural Insights Team, otherwise known as the Nudge Unit. Last night I watched a news item about how they have been changing the way officials communicate with taxpayers and consumers to … Continue reading

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