Malcolm Gaskill

The world they sought to understand belonged to them all, and demanded that a gifted few should work together to interpret the writings of former ages. Alchemists resembled learned theologians poring over the gospels, wary of mangling a single meaning and so missing or misrepresenting a holy truth. And with alchemy, everything needed interpretation because everything was obscure.

Cartoonists​ find it as easy to draw puritans as they do Vikings. There’s an example on my pinboard. A behatted man, buttoned up in black, admires his wife’s sampler, which reads: ‘Way to Go, God.’ ‘Nice sentiment, Martha,’ he beams. Martha wears the same gloomy sub fusc, with black bonnet and broad linen collar. Putting slang in puritan mouths is fun...

In​ May, I gave up my academic career after 27 years. A voluntary severance scheme had been announced in December, and I dithered about it until the pandemic enforced focus on a fuzzy dilemma. Already far from the sunlit uplands, universities would now, it seemed, descend into a dark tunnel. I swallowed hard, expressed an interest, hesitated, and then declared my intention to leave. A...

In​ 2000 Christopher Sansom took a year off from his job as a solicitor to write a novel: it had occurred to him that the dissolution of the monasteries might make a good backdrop to a murder mystery. He finished it, sent it off and returned from holiday expecting a stack of rejections. ‘To my delight,’ he told the Guardian in 2010, ‘my email was hot with people wanting...

In​ 2001 an architect called Danny Sullivan claimed to have found cine film of an angel while rooting around in a Monmouth junk shop. This was, unsurprisingly, a hoax, as were claims that Marlon Brando had paid £350,000 for the footage. But the alleged provenance was intriguing. Sullivan invented a psychical researcher called William Doidge, who had, he said, fought with the Scots...