• Kenneth Grahame

    All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

    ‘Rat!’ he found breath to whisper, shaking. ‘Are you afraid?’

    ‘Afraid?’ murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. ‘Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet— and yet— O, Mole, I am afraid!’

    Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

  • Rowan Williams

    Advent Calendar

    He will come like last leaf’s fall.
    One night when the November wind
    has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth
    wakes choking on the mould,
    the soft shroud’s folding.

    He will come like frost.
    One morning when the shrinking earth
    opens on mist, to find itself
    arrested in the net
    of alien, sword-set beauty.

    He will come like dark.
    One evening when the bursting red
    December sun draws up the sheet
    and penny-masks its eye to yield
    the star-snowed fields of sky.

    He will come, will come,
    will come like crying in the night,
    like blood, like breaking,
    as the earth writhes to toss him free.
    He will come like child.

  • Janan Ganesh

    The problem is systemic. The tolerable price of democracy is its pesky resistance to strategic government. Every policy is an amendment upon an improvisation upon a half-forgotten contingency, agreed by quarrelling interest groups amid the blare of the electorate.

  • Edmund Christopher Pery, 7th Earl of Limerick

    the following poem was submitted as the Earl’s Candidature Statement for election as one of the 92 hereditary peers to have a seat in the House of Lords following a vacancy

    The Upper House knows none so queer
    A creature as the Seatless Peer.
    Flamingo-like he stands all day
    With no support to hold his sway.
    And waits with covert eagerness
    For ninety-two to be one less.
    Then on to hustings he must pace
    Once more to plead his special case.
    Noble Lordships, spare a thought
    For one so vertically distraught,
    And from your seats so well entrenched,
    Please vote that mine may be embenched.