HeyJaredOutside the Castle
The Castle can mean many things. Think of Kafka, bureaucracy, Borges, the System, this Machine. For you it may be a faith, a philosophy; the world you have made. And me...I have stepped out of the Castle.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 10
- Latest publication
- Sep 30, 2026
- Audience
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 4, 2026
Latest issues
Clever Clogs (opens the original)
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The narrow and clever Cambridge mind overlooks the accidental and contingent, writes Stephen Alford in his account, it is a marvellous one, of Elizabethan spies, The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I. More interested in the intellectual pattern, they avoid, downgrade, overwrite, the human patchwork, its everyday mess, the peculiarities, the inevitable errors, of individual actors; it is to argue away a power-crazy’s paranoia, now but a sign of the times, the victim of the la
Fakes (opens the original)
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The end. It is nearly so. The last book in this series; to be a dull squib or will it sparkle? You to decide, when you read the Schloss on The Counterfeiters; perhaps the strangest of all our man’s strange novels. Albeit the most popular in Keith Fawkes, Hampstead’s madcap Mecca; less a bookshop than a sanatorium for books. Crazy! Looking for The Immoralist the other day all I could find were Gide’s confidence tricksters; lined across those overcrowded shelves, there they were, waiting to pick m
Losing It (opens the original)
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Do I need to write this piece? Stevie Smith, saying it so much better….Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedHe’d fads and he fed them fat, And she could lump it and that was that.1Dulled and deflated, I slowly pick up my hands, lethargically spread its fingers across the keyboard, and fumble out my
Hare (opens the original)
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What if the problem with education is its very act of comprehension, a need, so desperate in its urgency, it is a tic, an uncontrollable desire, for understanding? That urge to know, to grasp, to have; an epistemological hunt, the horses chasing down a question, the hounds grabbing a fact, tearing its truth apart, as the riders trumpet their victory. But what if this truth isn’t so easy to find; that in capturing that hare we kill it? What if…not to know is the secret of all scholarly strivings;
The Classroom Calls (opens the original)
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But there is a problem with the politick life: if the performance becomes too polished, too mechanical, if it is made frigidly impersonal, it will alienate the audience, who recognise the manipulation without feeling the passion; distance and cynicism the unfortunate consequence. Not tears but jeers. This why it is never quite enough to be a performer; you must bring something of yourself into the performance. Isaak Walton speaks again.preaching the Word so, as shewed his own heart was possest w
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