Marginalia & Essays
Reading, markets, institutions, travel and encounters that continue to shape what I notice and build.
Essays
A reflection on the Thomistic architecture of reality: being before thought, act and potency, form and matter, participation, causality, freedom and the good.
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Sertillanges taught me that serious thinking is not merely intelligence, but a discipline of attention, humility, method, memory and submission to truth.
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Eric H. Cline’s account of the Late Bronze Age collapse reveals not only how an interconnected world failed, but how societies adapted, recombined and built new orders from its ruins.
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Robert Harris’s Cicero Trilogy is one of the finest works of historical fiction I have read. Not because it taught me the chronology of the late Roman Republic, which I broadly knew, but because it made me feel it.
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Twenty years after first reading Plato’s Republic, its questions about function, authority, formation, incentives and institutional decline feel as relevant to organisations as they do to cities.
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I read Peter Sarris’s Justinian: Emperor, Soldier, Saint in September 2024. I had long been interested in Justinian. By the end of the book, that interest had become admiration.
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What stayed with me was the book’s demonstration that apocalypticism can migrate across media, periods and social settings while preserving a recognisable structure of meaning.
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Nearly twenty years after first reading Kirk and Raven, the Presocratics still shape how I think about change, order, mathematical structure and the obligations of reason.
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