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The 52:52:52 project, launching on this site and on social media in 2025, will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.

This site addresses what's changing, at the personal, organisational and societal levels. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 elements of life, from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and much more besides, which will help you better prepare for related change in your own life.

Halcyon In Kaleidoscope features irregular and fragmentary writings - on ideas and values, places and people - which evolve over time into mini essais, paying humble homage to the peerless founder of the genre. The kaleidoscope is Halcyon's prime metaphor, viewing the world through ever-moving lenses.

A Mundane Comedy is Dom Kelleher's new book, which will be published in 2025. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

Arts

On Modern Art
Transporting the Sphinxes
Halcyon In Kal… 31 December 2021

 

To Bozar in Brussels in 2016 for the final days of the Facing the Future exhibition, which shed light on about 180 works created between 1945 and 1968 by artists from Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Notwithstanding the tensions between Eastern and Western Europe in the years following the Second World War, artists on both sides of the Iron Curtain experimented in similar ways: from media art to action painting, conceptual art and sound art.  

See also:

 

On Jane Austen

Jane Austen

 

Though not particularly taken by recent film adaptations of her novels, and well-used to my family calling me "Mr Bennett", I remember very much enjoying Pride and Prejudice when I read it as a student in France.

Today, Jane Austen is loved mainly as a charming guide to fashionable life in the Regency period. She is admired for portraying a world of elegant houses, dances, servants and fashionable young men driving barouches. But her own vision of her task was radically different, believes The School of Life. She was an ambitious – and stern – moralist. She was acutely conscious of human failings and she had a deep desire to make people nicer: less selfish, more reasonable, more dignified and more sensitive to the needs of others.

On Podcasts
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Halcyon Inspired 1 November 2018

 

I have listened to and would recommend the following podcasts (2015-2018 recommendations to follow):

 

2014

On Ulverton

Ulverton

 

When I think of books whose messages have stayed with me down the years, I often think of Ulverton, which contrives somehow to feel more "authentic" than many a "non-fictional" historical text in bringing the past alive, lifting the edge of the veil and allowing us to see - at times almost voyeuristically - what Dylan Thomas called the "yellowing, dicky-bird watching pictures of the dead".

On Marcel Proust

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I realised that the essential book, the one true book, is one that the great writer does not need to invent, in the current sense of the word, since it already exists in every one of us — he has only to translate it. The task and the duty of a writer are those of a translator - Marcel Proust

After the BBC opened up its archives of In Our Time, I came to the episode about Marcel Proust.

On Calvin and Hobbes

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"Possibly the best comic strip EVER in the history of the entire universe", claimed one commentator.

I think Dennis the Menace (in its heydey), Gaston Lagaffe and one or others may occupy the same pantheon as Calvin and Hobbes, but there is little doubt that, for all those of us who have been deeply touched by the warmth, humour, sheer humanity with which Bill Watterson blessed us over so many years, these creations occupy a very special place in our hearts.