Category Archives: Stories

Good tidings

‘I guess I’m a “bad news” guy and you’re my “good news” twin…’ So said my old friend Paul Phillips recently. Paul writes a well-informed and trenchant blog on those big topical issues – Savile, Leveson, Starbucks and so on … Continue reading →

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House of stories

In March we’re taking a Dark Angels group to the Highlands to see if we can write a collective novel. It’s a slightly mad idea but we’ve reached the point now where we have a group of people who’ve been … Continue reading →

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Tales of passion

On the second night of our recent Dark Angels advanced course in Spain, once they had all settled in, we decided to ask the eight students to take just a couple of minutes after dinner to say why they had … Continue reading →

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Swedish angels

Something extraordinary happens on Dark Angels courses. People who don’t even think of themselves as writers discover that the simplest of words have a power to connect beyond their wildest imaginings. And the connections they make are not only with … Continue reading →

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Olympic virtues

On Radio 4 recently, Clifford Longley, the BBC’s religious affairs correspondent, quoted Bob Diamond’s notorious comment that business culture was ‘how people behave when no one’s watching’. Longley went on to draw the distinction between the self-interest that governs so … Continue reading →

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Reading matters

A circular from the Society of Authors dropped into my inbox yesterday morning. Although the theme was not a new one, I stopped and read it carefully. The Society of Authors is the unaffiliated trade union that represents around 9,000 … Continue reading →

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Other Worlds

This coming Monday evening the whole of Rochester House, the old Oxford central telephone exchange and mail sorting office, will come alive after many years of disuse. Its three rambling, empty buildings, linked around a courtyard, will fill with people … Continue reading →

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Tongue-tied

It’s unpleasant to feel a language slipping from one’s grasp. There was a time when I was a confident French speaker. I was taught it very well at an early age by an inspired teacher who showed us large pictures of … Continue reading →

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Father and son

Today, 29th March, is my son Jake’s twenty-first birthday and I’m not at home with him. I very much wish I was. Instead I’m deep in the Northumbrian countryside at Highgreen Manor, home of William and Cynthia Morrison-Bell, running a … Continue reading →

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The Witness

When I came back to Scotland in 1990 after living in London for 20 years it seemed like a different country to the one I had left. The spirit of John Knox had finally been banished from the streets of … Continue reading →

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