Guy Stagg

Writer and walker / Books: The World Within (2025), The Crossway (2018) / Words in @FT @spectator @TheTLS / Agent: @RCWlitagency

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

Pleased to be back in @spectator reviewing @hannahluci's fascinating new book 'Hinterlands' about the overlooked conflicts on the fringes of Europe - featuring gazelles, crypto mining, Soviet summer camps and the Putin-Erdogan bromance: https://t.co/JuoxnJrPcj

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There’s peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
[...]
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

"Noto is a kind of folly, a little miracle at the end of Europe."

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

Delighted to discover that, when it opened in 1867, the Grand Hotel Scarborough was the largest hotel in Europe, and one of the largest brick structures in the world.

[Henry Oliver @HenryEOliver]

“The whole influence of psychology has turned our interest to what George Eliot would have called the downward path... We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.”

—V.S. Pritchett, 1946

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

I suspect that the human species - the unique species - is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret. - Borges, The Library of Babel

[William Whyte @william_whyte]

In the Bodleian bookstore

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

@CapelLofft This is almost a description of Rose Macaulay's wonderful novel The Towers of Trebizond.

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

'The Trees' by Philip Larkin

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

Pleased to be back in the @TheTLS reviewing two fascinating books about Sicily by @TimParksauthor and Helena Atlee: https://t.co/G9V1zR9fDl

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

Wilfred Thesiger: 'the stillness of a world that never knew an engine'.

[Mustafa @Sufi495]

إنتعاش اهوار العراق بعد كثرة الأمطار هذه السنة

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

Given T.S. Eliot's animosity towards Bertrand Russell - over Vivienne, over religion - I imagine he was particularly delighted by this last line.

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

@Kulambq What is the best order in which to read his novels? Is there any criticism you would recommend? Despite my interest in authors who explore religious questions, the New Age flavour of his fans has always put me off.

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

This is what central London looks like right now.

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

@LRB used to have a Boomer distaste for discussing religion. Pleased that policy has started shifting; this podcast on Pope Leo v Donald Trump goes deep into the intellectual history of the debate: https://t.co/ROX9NBF3ci

[Matt Edwards @Matedwards7]

Springtime woodland in
Suffolk, UK.

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

Great mini-documentary on the lost Lutyens Liverpool Cathedral: https://t.co/X9rp8PSPYZ

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

County Longford between the rain showers.

[Richard Morris @ahistoryinart]

Fred Cuming was considered one of the finest landscape painters of his generation. Much of his work celebrates southern English coastlines; the sea and skies of Hastings, Rye or Camber as here, illuminated by dawn, dusk, or glowing moonlight.

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

@cusackandrew Even the royal arms are filthy! And concrete, unlike stone, does not age gracefully.

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

@hedgenettle @clarescastle Better in black and white.

[Guy Stagg @GuyStagg]

Basil Spence's Coventry Cathedral is a beautiful Modernist sacred space, but his Brutalist British embassy in Rome is a nightmare.