Flanagan's new book weaves strange narratives. Szilard - using Einstein as a 'mailbox' - warns Roosevelt the Nazis are developing an atom bomb. The writer's dying grandmother foresees another death in the family. History and memoir revolve around the invention of The Bomb: dirge-like and hypnotic..

Try Rowan Williams' new book on ancient Eastern monastic tradition. Williams' synthesis - for lay readers - shows how practising faith like Desert Mothers and Fathers loosens the hold of a material - materialistic - world. Eastern ideas are more subtle than brittle Western medieval visions of sin.

Nick Cave's new single Wild God lifts you somewhere above the few dark concrete details. The gospel choir do the real work. Possibly Emily Bronte said a similar thing better?
'No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere...'

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43712/...

Read more Bill at hannahglickstein.blog

My old friend Skinny Bill was at his Post Office Christmas do recently...

My recent article explores the potential danger in canonizing Dorothy Day, a complex and exceptional 20th C poverty campaigner, journalist and author, whose life was rarely a cliche of Catholic holiness. catholicherald.co.uk/lets-not-can...