Born in 1606, Rembrandt became a hugely successful painter when he was still only in his twenties. He earned a fortune and lived a wildly extravagant life. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait with Saskia, circa 1636 But by his early fifties, he was all but bankrupt: he had to sell his…
In 1821, the 45-year-old English painter John Constable went out on to Hampstead Heath and did something very loving. He set up his easel and looked closely at an elm tree.…
Some of what holds people back from showing greater love is a sense that it would be dangerous and woolly-minded to do so. Too much sensitivity and sweetness, too much tolerance…
One of the reasons why we may end up acting more destructively and cruelly than we should is that it can take us a long time to fathom how someone like…
One of the cruellest aspects of mental illness is that it strips us of any ability to believe that other people might be suffering in the way we are. We aren’t…
One of the major reasons why our lives are busier than they might be is that we come under immense pressures to ‘go out’, usually in the evening, typically to one…
There is so much talk of love in our societies, it would be natural to think that we must by now know what it is and why it counts. Love is…