A glance at some old material; and a brief travel update

I recently came across my author page at the now-archived site, Secular Right. At the time (about eight years ago) I began publishing pieces at Secular Right, its founder, Razib Khan, had shifted his focus to other sites and Secular Right was slowly winding down. It moved into archive mode sometime after I published my sixth and final …

Imperial overreach

(Reposted from my Substack site.) I am setting out here, as concisely as I can, a general perspective on politics, political thinking and the current geopolitical situation. As I see it, every political action, intervention or attempted reset alters the status quo, killing off certain previously live possibilities and opening up new ones. Change feeds …

What Shakespeare meant – and means – to me

[The following piece is reprinted from my Substack (markenglish.substack.com).] For many years only a few scenes or fragments of verse stayed with me but gradually, as I looked into the authorship question, the writer's personality and philosophy began to come into focus... In the past, Shakespeare floated in my consciousness as a given, as an …

Extended stay in Sarajevo

What follows is a slightly revised and updated version of a post which appeared earlier this month on my Substack site (markenglish.substack.com)... In late July I travelled from London to Eindhoven in the Netherlands and, eight weeks later, took a coach to Charleroi in Wallonia. I would have liked to stay on but EU rules …

Logic applied

Having settled into a routine at a hotel in a semi-rural part of Essex, I decided to stay on. I've been here since March, in fact, and remain very much in observation and absorption mode (this with respect to both the cultural and the natural environment). I've been doing a lot of walking, a lot …

Who wrote the works of Shakespeare?

The Shakespeare authorship question was not a topic I had ever taken a special interest in. As a student I simply accepted the conventional view. Over time, however, I realized that a rigorous, evidence-based case for the glover’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon as author of the works in question had never, in fact, been made and …

Germany: a few thoughts and impressions

A few thoughts and personal impressions garnered from my twelve-week stay. https://markenglish.substack.com/p/brief-travel-update-germany?r=3knty7

Travel update: thoughts from Belgium, Albania and Germany

For the past fifteen months I have been travelling in Europe, staying successively in Greece, Bulgaria, Malta, England, Germany, Belgium and Albania. I'm now back in Germany. I've published occasional pieces on these wanderings but nothing for more than four months now. Here, then, are some recent thoughts and observations on specific places and on …

Coming to terms with cultural change in Europe

I haven't been writing much lately but it's important to me to keep some kind of diary going which is accessible to friends, relations and other interested parties. My focus recently has been on Substack but I also want to keep this site going. Here, then, is my latest Substack piece which has the somewhat …

Substack piece on the limits of language

Here is the link to a short Substack piece in which I explain why, in my view, language doesn't really do what we naively think it does: https://markenglish.substack.com/p/language-does-not-convey-thoughts