George Frederic Watts’ symbolist oil painting Hope shows a scantily clad female  figure (Hope herself) sitting on a globe, blindfolded, clutching a wooden lyre with only one string left intact. She sits in a hunched position, with her head leaning towards the instrument – perhaps so she can hear the faint music she can make […]

About 20 years ago I wrote a controversial article entitled ‘Don’t Just Do Something … Stand There!’. The gist of the article was that too many of us are simply too busy for the sake of it. All too often our activity, for all its energy, is fruitless. Like the Seven Dwarves we are ‘busy […]

In the West Bank, Israel’s security barrier has started to resemble the western side of the Berlin Wall in its heyday.  The Israeli side is bleak and clean, but on the Palestinian side graffiti flourishes.  A few years ago the British graffiti artist Banksy stencilled a number of his famous cartoons on the wall and […]