We need to stop reeling from crisis to crisis, and build a Vancouver where everyone has a voice, a place, a future and you can count on cool, clean, safe air to breathe. 10/11
Michael Ledger-Lomas
@michaelledgerlomas.bsky.social
I write about kings and prophets. Vancouver, BC.
If you are in Vancouver and you are oppressed by the sense that we never confront the problems we face, please, please vote for this guy. If you aren't and/or you aren't, carry on.
Vancouver has some of the worst air quality in the world right now. So today, we're announcing the Cool, Clean Air, and Safe Spaces Strategy. One standard, applied to every school, every library, every community centre in Vancouver, whether it's run by Council, Park Board, or School Board. 🧵 1/11
I mentioned Vance's memoir in the last issue so excellent to see this scathing treatment of it in the current one (along with Hollinghurst on that equally odd convert, Ronald Firbank).
For the new issue of the @lrb.co.uk I read J.D. Vance's tremendously unpleasant memoir of his conversion, which is at once an evasion of moral responsibility and a pre-2028 argument for a generic Christian nationalism. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
I'm just back from the UK - hardly the greenest country - where this denialism just looks weird.
This is genuinely astonishing: a piece by the Globe and Mail’s editorial board lamenting the “new normal” of wildfires and summer smoke and no mention whatsoever of a) climate change, or b) the burning of fossil fuels that causes it. #cdnpoli www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/edit...
The final repost - time to write something new.
‘In accepting Catholic authority, writers unleashed their imaginations. As Graham Greene said, quoting Saki, “When once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations, its possibilities become practically limitless.”’ @michaelledgerlomas.bsky.social on converts. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Because it is ploddingly plotted and deep-dyed in misanthropy, Conrad's Chance was a horrible pick for holiday reading. And yet it is genuinely great as it nears its close.
'We all seem a little mad to each other; an excellent arrangement for the bulk of humanity which finds in it an easy motive for forgiveness' - Conrad.
My parents own/are custodians of what even Vancouverites would call a very noble tree.
How banal are the plots we impose on others’ lives. —Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives
I went to the excellent Toppings in York and all I wanted was this.
Come to the LRB site to read Emily Wilson on Nolan, linger to discover....wait...come back
‘Although R.H. Benson became the loudest Catholic voice of Edwardian England, his voluminous output shows how converts who had it all their own way often ended up ranting (the dogma in his novels was the “gritty powder in the jam”).’ Michael Ledger-Lomas on converts. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘Ten days ago, Andy Burnham stood outside Number 10 and announced “the biggest changes in the last forty years”. One thing that won’t change is the use of British bases by American military aircraft bombing Iran.’ New from @desfreedman.bsky.social, on the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...
Des Freedman | Bombs Away
Ten days ago, Andy Burnham stood outside Number 10 and announced a ‘circuit breaker for Britain, bringing forward the...
lrb.co.uk
I hope some museum will collect the last traces of the Hi, Historian Here Culture.
Graduation-ready! How many of these can I smuggle in the sleeves of my gown… Thanks SO much for the supply, @royalhistsoc.org! They’ll look splendid on our newly-minted historians!
Tell me about a complicated magazine. Try the 𝘓𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘰𝘯 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸 𝘰𝘧 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴 for three months, in print and online, for just £6. subscription.lrb.co.uk/offers/social
The woodcut ascendancy: Yasuda Yukihiko's vision of 'The Japanese Navy's Attack on Port Arthur' (1904).
Rat on a mallet (1900) - a perfect vision of the century to come.
Cream tea served by nuns - new England level unlocked.
The wonderfully Shandean tomb of Sterne's grandfather.
York Minster from the city walls with the bells pealing then tolling eight - I have witnessed few things more beautiful.
Wonderful that the oldest depiction of Constantine (they say) is in the Yorkshire Museum.
We're so back. Sorry about the website issues earlier. @emilyrcwilson.bsky.social’s 𝘖𝘥𝘺𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘺 review is now fully available online. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Emily Wilson · An Uncomplicated Man
As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Christopher Nolan has read at least the first line of my...
lrb.co.uk
You find me at a very Edwardian time of life (1906)
Rude not to follow the sign to the Anglo-Saxon Church tower on the way to the mini Sainsburys.
The wondrous palimpsest of York: the Queen Anne heap of The Grand Hotel, a Great War obelisk and the towers of the Minster cheekily photobombed by Catholic St Wilfrid's.