Leadership is often spoken of in terms of action, influence, and performance. We imagine leaders as people who stand at the front, who speak with clarity and carry a group from one place to another. Yet those who have led for any length of time know that the real work begins elsewhere. It begins in the quiet part of a life, in the part that is not on display.

Every organisation has two lives. One is visible and busy. It deals with plans, meetings, deadlines, and reports. The other is quieter. It is carried in the way people greet one another, in what th…

When Elon Musk appeared on screen at a far-right protest in London and told his audience that violence was coming, he spoke with the air of a man delivering prophecy rather than making a speech. He…

Outside Trinity College Dublin stands the statue of Edmund Burke, the parliamentarian and writer who lived from 1729 to 1797. Students hurry past. Tourists pause briefly. Traffic flows on. Most wil…

I had been working on this piece all week and it was missing something. Notes about the season turning, scraps about the constellations, half-thoughts about the weight of winter. But none of it hel…

The Irish presidency holds almost no formal authority, yet it has carried extraordinary weight. When under threat in the 1970s, its strength was restraint. Today, its danger is theatre. When de Val…

This essay follows an earlier visit to Skjolden in Norway, where Wittgenstein built his hut. Weeks later I travelled to Rosroe in Ireland, where he lived for a time in a cottage on the Atlantic edg…

The pursuit of happiness is one of the most famous promises in political history. When Thomas Jefferson wrote those words into the American Declaration of Independence, he was borrowing from the cu…

A reader got in touch after yesterday’s piece on William Blake and the Paolozzi statue of Newton outside the British Library. They ask how I explain Blake’s apparent madness. My first response is t…

For years, I worked just a short walk from the British Library. My job in higher education often brought me there for meetings and between sessions I’d sometimes step outside for air (actually, I w…

Last Saturday I visited Wittgenstein’s hut, high above a fjord in Norway, near the village of Skjolden. I travelled there with two Scandinavian friends, Åke and Helge. We were pilgrims of sorts, dr…

Chesterton for a Stoic I think like a Stoic now, most of the time. I find comfort in restraint, in steadiness, in the daily work of aligning life with reason. It helps.   It wasn’t always this…

The Sycamore Gap tree stood alone in a dip along Hadrian’s Wall. For over a century, it shaped the landscape around it. It was a solitary presence known not just for its beauty. It seemed to belong…

This reflection began, unexpectedly, with a reference to Moby-Dick among the John Moriarty community on Facebook. In that space, something stirred. The image of Jesus arose not simply as a figure o…

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Stoic practice & Spirituality