A specialist consultancy providing bespoke advice and creative solutions for complex cultural, ethical, and religious issues in contemporary geopolitics.
Oxford House Research publishes weekly briefing papers on topical and global issues authored by associates and a range of external contributors. Members receive these by email each week.
In the self-help book Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair (2013), Californian author Anne Lamott, writes: ‘Maturity is the ability to live with unresolved problems.’ Faced by the devastation of broken promises, failure, pain, and cultural angst, advice on how to live with the ‘unresolved’ sells well. To the tidy-minded, over-confident and despairing […]
Continue ReadingThere has been a visceral sense of relief here in Ireland at a Biden victory in the recent US presidential election. Ireland has always held America and American Presidents in high esteem. This was eroded during the presidency of George W. Bush (b. 1946; Pres. 2001-09) and has been damaged further during President Trump’s time […]
Continue ReadingThis is the first of three ‘Weekly Briefings’ on my experiences teaching and advising in China on the ‘rule of law’ and ‘civil society’. In this first ‘Briefing’, I reflect on my first five years of visiting China, from 2008-12. On 15 May 2008, the Great Earthquake of Sichuan Province hit Southwest China. At almost […]
Continue ReadingIn 1997, I was living and working in Tanzania. The General Election held in the UK on May 1 of that year saw the scandal-ridden Conservative party (led by John Major) blown out of office by the fresh winds of Tony Blair and the ‘New Labour’ party, who promised change, devolution, fiscal responsibility and more […]
Continue ReadingBy late February 2020 it was clear COVID–19 was going to be disruptive, and not just to our international travels. Broadcasts reported graphically of death and destruction in Italy, a far more familiar and immediate place to most Americans than the three-city megapolis of Wuhan, China, whose struggles gripped us in January. Even the optimistic […]
Continue ReadingScholars – and not a few wits – have debated for decades the definition (and importance) of a literary ‘classic’. In a 1900 lecture, ‘Disappearance of Literature’, the American author Mark Twain (1835-1900), who was always ready with an incisive quip, quoted a contemporary academic’s view that a classic is ‘something that everybody wants to […]
Continue ReadingErnest Hemingway’s (1899-1961) novel about the Spanish Civil War (1936-9), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), takes its title from a meditation by a former Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, John Donne (1572-1631; Meditation XVII of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions). The poem ends with the poignant lines (mod. transl.): ‘And therefore never send to […]
Continue ReadingIn a world of corrupted ‘news’ (see Weekly Briefing, 5 October 2020) speech writers have a vital role. Their job is to anticipate – and redirect – editorial agendas with timely one-liners. Sir Ronald Millar (1919-1998) – by profession an actor, script writer and dramatist – had been British PM Margaret Thatcher’s (1925-2013) speech writer […]
Continue ReadingThe twists and turns of this year’s US Presidential Election are keeping commentators and electors unusually busy. Industries and individuals whose livelihoods depend on making and selling ‘news’ are delighted, of course. We don’t need them to tell us more is to come! Our world is full, overfull surely, of what is still (presumptuously or […]
Continue ReadingThe satirical, politically-engaged essayist, and Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) – known by many for his mythical tale Gulliver’s Travels (1726) – memorably declared on one occasion: ‘We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.’ His words have always seemed to […]
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