The Ironist
Differing Perspectives
Forgotten Heroes #7 – Boris the Butt Brush
Nigel explains how the Roman precursor to our modern toilet brush, the xylospongium, gave us our grilled meat on a stick, our modern kebabs…and then he concludes with an original Parthian recipe. The other day, while fulminating on the algorithmic vacuity of Facebook,...
Rowing with Imagination – On Xenophon
Nigel writes an encomium for the Cost of Glory... Twenty minutes on the rowing machine and the display will dutifully say I have rowed 3.7 kilometres. But that is not really where I am. In my mind, memories merge. I am rowing from Miletus on the Maeander to Lesbos....
Ramblings #8 – Look Back and Learn
Nigel writes on the irony of hindsight, and how looking back is the only way we ever really learn. “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.” - George Eliot, Middlemarch It is a long drive to Ottawa, and one that I have...
What The Remains of the Day Teaches About Life’s Ironies
In The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro holds up a mirror to our own compromises— how much of life we trade away in the name of duty. “The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.” I wish. To be...
Irony #2 – The Virtue of the Ironist
Irony and the human condition: Peter Scotchmer on why double vision matters more than ever. “…the ironist is caught in a boundary zone between two opposed and mutually exclusive perspectives… between the necessity to believe in the world as it ought to be, and the...
The Banality of Evil
Irony, #1 – Hannah Arendt, the Refugee from Königsberg - Nigel writes about a stateless thinker who made irony her weapon against totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture Königsberg was a jewel on the coast of the Baltic. For...
Forgotten Heroes #6 – Rattus Romanus
Nigel writes about a long-forgotten chapter of Roman history: the rise and recipes of Rattus Romanus, consul, Stoic, and father of fusion cuisine. Everyone knows the great suffering rats endured during the Black Death. For centuries, historians, poets,...
In Defence of Leisure
Forget "live-to-work". The ancients believed leisure—not work—was the highest purpose of human life. In this essay, Jonathan defends self-cultivation through art, conversation, and exploration. “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem,...
The Reading Chair Backstory : On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith has called On Beauty an “homage” to E.M. Forster’s Howards End, though not in a plot-by-plot sense.