Showing results by narrator "Charles Featherstone" in All Categories

A wonderful and whimsical collection of short essays on everything from sketching on brown paper and building toy theatres to the nature of Englishness and faith.

History is often concentrated into short bursts of change, with long periods of shifting before and waves of alteration afterwards. Nowhere is this more obvious than the thirty year interregnum between the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. In this period, three figures stand tall; Pitt, the elder stateman who saw the need for genuine constitutionalism; Burke, the consummate parliamentarian, speaking for the glory of empire; and Robespierre, the legendary and controversial frontman of the French Revolution.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to Alarms and Discursions and enjoy GK Chesterton's prolific writing.

Just as with the liberation fighters, socialists, and anarchists of previous volumes, these historical figures lived under great threat, attacking vast forces with little more than courage and the certainty of their beliefs. They stand as the bridge over the cultural change between the middle ages and the renaissance.

Progressive Islam takes over England, and two men go on the run with a barrel of rum and a wheel of cheese, intent on keeping English pub life alive. Packed with songs, satire, and style as only Chesteron could write. And what are these drinking songs that came under such fire? Simply some of the dearest and most delightful poems that Chesterton or anyone else has ever written: The Song of Right and Wrong, The Song of the Dog Quoodle, Wine and Water, The Logical Vegetarian, The Good Rich Man, The Saracen’s Head, and The Rolling English Road."

There are artists out there able to lift the spirits of the downtrodden, who point towards a better world with all they are. Sometimes, they do this in DIY punk style: raw, unplugged, and deeply human. Patrick Schneeweis, better known as Pat the Bunny, is an artist who chose the road less travelled, instinctively deeming it more honest and less controlling. Freer. He grew up in Vermont, where he found people liked his voice and the controversial topics he tackled, and by 16 years old, he had released his first album ‘Fire Hazard’.

The birth of liberation movements in the C19th saw a rise in fighting for the rights of workers. William Morris believed decries the belief “not that Commerce was made for man, but that man was made for Commerce”, with the profit motive that renders all work miserable when “It is right and necessary that all men should have work to do which shall be worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to do; and which should be done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious.”

In a utopian future society, where all social unrest has been engineered away, a man has an awakening. Starting as a happy worker drone, he meets a woman who reveals to him the reality of life outside the state's control - the glories of chaotic nature in the world and in the heart. They become entwined with a conspiracy against the state, and eventually try to escape beyond the walls of the state's control... only to meet betrayal, failure, and a dark ending in the glorious light of the state's total control.