The Ironist
Differing Perspectives
From San Blas to Oxford: A Review of Shooting Up
A missionary family raises four boys in one of Madrid's most drug-ravaged neighbourhoods. Jonathan Tepper's memoir traces an extraordinary journey. Jonathan Tepper’s Shooting Up is much more than the account of four brothers in a missionary family growing up in Spain...
WORDS, WORDS, WORDS III
This is the third essay by Peter as part of The Ironist’s continuing series of articles on language and literature. Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Polonius: I mean, the...
From Ahura Mazda to Lucifer: Angels and the Dualism of Good and Evil
The second part of Dr. Hara's series on angels traces how Zoroastrian dualism handed the cosmos its central plot - good versus evil. In the previous essay, we traced the lineage of the guardian spirit from Sumerian temple guardian to Assyrian colossal. Yet that...
Polite Revolutions: A Gentleman in Moscow and the Comforts of Confinement
First a bestseller and now a prestige television series, A Gentleman in Moscow invites us to believe that grace and civility might yet survive the twentieth century’s great undoing. Picture Credits: Amazon Some months ago, I read A Gentleman in Moscow during a...
Guardians Before God: The Sumerian Origins of Angels
Dr Hara's research on the winged messengers of Western faith starts with these wingless creatures guarding Sumerian doorways. This is the story of angels and how they learned to fly... When we think of angels, we conjure images refined by centuries of Christian art:...
RAMBLINGS #10 – Goodbye Mt. Parnassos, Hello War
A drive down from myth-haunted Mt. Parnassus into the passes, graveyards, and battlefields Picture Credits: Edward Dodwell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons It is said that Zeus, the great philanderer, lay with Mnemosyne (Memory), a Titan, for a marathon...
Words, Words, Words II: Inspiration
This is the second essay by Peter on the intricacies of the English language. Here, he writes on where inspiration comes from, and why no amount of effort can quite summon it. My first piece in the English language series talked about the quality of writing that...
The Last Puritan
Alexander Montgomery writes a fleeting, intimate glimpse of Glenn Gould, the genius and the strange solitude of his greatness. Glenn Gould’s sitting in Fran’s Deli, St. Clair East, and I sit here, watching him from the pub across the street. There he is, the bastard,...
The Awkward One: Rediscovering Mary Bennett
About the most forgettable Bennet sister and a retelling of Pride and Prejudice... “There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the...