Pictures of St Charles Borromeo, the man who did more than most to save the Catholic church from the Reformation and who was an outstanding Archbishop of Milan. And so he should ! He was a Medici.

Boris Johnson referred to Britain as the incredible hulk.

In front of the angry hulk are three Remainer ladies who know what is best for us all because they are better people than we are…

The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.

Nor all thy piety nor wit

Cn lure it back to cancel half a line.

Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it…

Omar Khayyam loved being in the pub as the slate mounted up…

More of one of my most favourite poets: illustrated.

If you see the originals (the nude lady with wings on her feet to make is Classical), you will appreciate this:

Now the New Year reviving old desires

The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires,

Where the WHITE HAND of MOSES on the bough

Puts out, and JESUS \from the Ground suspires.

Indeed, indeed Repentance oft before 

I swore - but was I sober when I swore?

And then and then came spring - and Rose in Hand

My thread-bare Penitence a-pieces tore.

This morning (06-09-19) I rezd this on Spiked online.

It is about Ruskin the famous Victorian who married Effie Gray and who never consummated his marriage. Why? He was put off when he was his wife's public hair! She later married Millais.
Then he fell in love with a little girl of just 14, one of his drawing students - Rose la Touche. When she got to 18, he proposed and she refused him. He then became a rabid Socialist who really cared about the degradation of the working man. There was never any sign of impropriety, by the way. But - hey - that is not enough for either the Victorians or for us!

Read this: it is exactly how I feel about art.

He discovered Turner.

He believed that nature had been created by God for man and that all great art was praise. He spent much of his creative life teaching and encouraging others. He didn’t exhibit his own work – he didn’t think it worthy. It was for others to decide whether to exhibit his work after his death. William Morris said of him, ‘He seemed to point out a new road on which others should travel’.

…

Artists are no longer judged on the artistic merits of their work alone but on the supposed politics of their work – whether it is suitably progressive or otherwise. It’s a new kind of Stalinism

I adore the Rubayyat of Omar Khayyam translated by Edward Fitzgerald.

Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough,
A flask of wine, a book of verse, and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness,
And wilderness is paradise enow.

And as the cock crew, those who stood before

The Tavern shouted, "Open then the door!

"You know how little time we have to stay,

"And once departed may return no more."

The latest at the Secret Garden.