Pen Hanley

Category: Books

  • Lost in the corridors of time

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    I’m back. Because finally I sent in my draft of Chapter 2 of the Churchill Trust book. I’d been working on it for ages, getting up at 5.00 am and writing before work and it was a hard one plus had been very busy at my other job, my real job, and the day I…

  • A kinder way to treat a potato

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    ‘Don’t get your food from the same place your car does.’ This is the advice of writer Michael Pollan. American petrol stations make more money from food and cigarettes than from petrol. It’s very probably the same here in Australia. And the food is all ‘Highly process non-perishable snack foods and extravagantly sweetened soft drinks…’…

  • Good person goes bad …

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    Óleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, regarded by many as one of the most beneficent agents in the history of espionage, was tried and sentenced to death in Moscow in 1963. Having only by a near miracle escaped that fate myself in 1985, I naturally have a close personal interest in the subject of this monograph.’  Now, that’s…

  • Beyond all rights and wrongs…

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    ‘Beyond all rights and wrongs, there is a field – I will meet you there.’ Rumi said that. I found it in Richard Brennan’s Alexander Technique: Change your posture, change your life. It’s in the Canberra public library system and fairly recent. It’s a good book with some wonderful quotations in it. Who was Rumi?…

  • The Valley of Pitch

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    ‘I’m hoping that the Greeks will discover a long-lost patent on the isosceles triangle. They could then threaten to bankrupt all northern economies by collecting unpaid royalties, and then forgive our debt providing we abolish corporations.’ Rob Newman in The New Internationalist, May 2013, p. 38. Rob Newman is an English comedian. He has written…

  • Playing with language and playing with food

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    This blog is about language and literature and health and life so today I’m going to share the websites and blogs of three people who improve our mental and physical lives by their brilliant ideas – the first one is Jules Clancy, the second Sarah Wilson and the third a Canadian guy called James Harbeck.…

  • Measuring our lives

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    In Seneca’s time, ‘Elite, literate Romans were discovering the great paradox of information: the more of it that’s available, the harder it is to be truly knowledgeable. It was impossible to process it all in a thoughtful way. So there was a tendency to graze, skim the surface, look for shortcuts.’ (William Powers, Hamlet’s Blackberry,…

  • Hamlet’s Blackberry

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    William Powers in his provocative, accessible book Hamlet’s Blackberry (Scribe, 2010), relates what happened while he was leaning from his boat to disentangle a propeller blade from a piece of rope mooring another boat to the jetty: he fell in to the water – splash! After some floundering and embarrassing moments he climbed back up…

  • Capitalism and gardening

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    A businessman was on holiday in a small Greek coastal village where he started chatting to a humble Greek fisherman who had just come in with his small fishing boat with his morning’s catch. When asked why he had come in after only a few hours’ fishing, the fisherman replied he had enough for his…

  • How to be Idle and The Two Percent Solution

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    It was the old days of telegrams. You paid per word for the speedy delivery of your message, so they often had a particular tone of terse urgency. They had a tendency to contain either very good or very bad news, news that could not wait for the post. Robert Hughes, late with his commissioned…