Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • A book on the wall

    A book on the wall

    For a small, softly-spoken country, Scotland carries a large intellectual stick. Voltaire said that ‘we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation’, and its influence during the Enlightenment would probably be hard to overstate. It’s difficult to find agreement on exactly what or when the Enlightenment was, but eighteenth century Scotland was well Read more

  • Distant whispers

    Distant whispers

    Whispers sometimes reach our ears from long-silenced voices, reverberations reflected by a documentary record that has diversified over the last century-and-a-half to include photography, recorded audio, video and a still expanding palette of newer media. Tradition and transmitted recollection have been augmented by technologies with an appearance of truthfulness, which sometimes fail to preserve precisely Read more

  • Capitalising on the dark

    Capitalising on the dark

    Darkness is an abundant resource during December in Edinburgh. To many of the city’s residents, trapped in an indoor workplace during the season’s fleeting daylight hours, this may sound like an insufferably upbeat formulation, but for anyone wishing to capitalise on festive cheer, it’s a gift. Christmas markets, cosy shop-fronts, street illuminations, the warm glow Read more

  • Congenial hubris

    Congenial hubris

    Spouse and I first visited The Sheep Heid Inn at the end of a long walk with Spawn, through Holyrood Park in near total darkness. It was the Saturday before November 5, and we’d been planning to climb Arthur’s Seat for a view of any fireworks that might be going off, but low cloud and Read more

  • Energy and entertainment

    Energy and entertainment

    My long-interrupted project to read or re-read all of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion books has at last been resumed, after several years’ hiatus. Volume 3 in this 1990s omnibus series brings together the original four Hawkmoon novels, which were the first Moorcock I ever read, aged thirteen. I read the books as they were written: Read more

  • Perfectly judged

    Aaron Gibson’s songwriting is perfectly married to his delivery, each as gnarled and burnished as it is raw and young-at-heart. Stylistically, his musical materials are somewhere in the borders between alternative rock and Americana, with a powerfully narrative lyrical approach. Warm, triadic harmonies are built into dramatic structures in which dynamics are as central as Read more