mysticism

Why did Jon Fosse win the Nobel Prize for literature? It’s baffling.

4 November 2023 9:00 am

If Jon Fosse’s novels are experimental, they are experiments in exhausting banality, says Philip Hensher

The phoney mystics who fooled the West

2 September 2023 9:00 am

Many suspect mystics have exploited naive westerners in search of spiritual enlightenment over the past century, Philip Hensher discovers

Four disparate intellectuals

5 August 2023 9:00 am

Of Wolfram Eilenberger’s four intellectual heroines, Simone Weil alone really counts as a ‘visionary’, forsaking philosophy for a kind of saintly mysticism

‘Jerusalem’ is a rousing anthem – but who knows what the words mean?

9 July 2022 9:00 am

‘Jerusalem’ may be our unofficial national anthem, but don’t ask anyone who sings it to tell you what it means, says Philip Hensher

The great awakening: Henry Shukman becomes a child of the universe

24 July 2021 9:00 am

For eight years I rented a small house in Oxford overlooking the canal. The landlord, a poet and novelist younger…

Spectacular and mind-expanding: Tantra at the British Museum reviewed

3 October 2020 9:00 am

A great temple of the goddess Tara can be found at Tarapith in West Bengal. But her true abode, in…

A 17th-century Kabbalah amulet. The seven-branched candlestick is made up of words

Will we ever unravel the mysteries of Kabbalah?

26 January 2019 9:00 am

In an age where ‘authenticity’ is prized above all things (even if what this actually means is that — like,…

‘Capel-y-ffin’, 1926–7 (watercolour and gouache)

David Jones: painter, poet and mystic

26 September 2015 8:00 am

David Jones (1895–1974) was a remarkable figure: artist and poet, he was a great original in both disciplines. His was…

Death by Dior, by Terry Cooper - review

10 August 2013 9:00 am

This book may sound like it’s going to be about high fashion, but it’s actually about Nazism, satanism, incest and…