Clifford Thurlow

leer en español        The train from Paris pushed south through the Pyrenees. Outside, the mountains loomed cold and jagged against a February sky. Inside, a young woman with a high laugh and a hat borrowed from a friend clutched the arm of her companion. Jessica Mitford was nineteen, the daughter of a baron, the product of country-house rituals and debutante balls. She was also on the run.Beside her sat Esmond Romilly, nephew of Winston Churchill, the sort of reckless boy English families whispered about in drawing rooms and expelled from schools. Together, they were dashing for Spain, a country of bombs, shortages and death. For Jessica – Decca, as she was known – it was not an elopement but a declaration. In 1930s Britain, where appeasers toasted Hitler in Mayfair and dockers rattled p...

leer en español In April 1904, in Killarney, County Kerry, Robert Martin Hilliard was born into the comforts of a middle-class family. He would live only 32 years, but in that brief span he became many men: scholar, boxer, clergyman, journalist, communist, soldier. His story is a parable of a turbulent age.Hilliard excelled at Trinity College, Dublin, and fought in the bantamweight division of the 1924 Paris Olympics. He married his childhood sweetheart, Rosemary, fathered four children, and entered the Church of Ireland ministry in Belfast. But he was restless. Poverty on the streets, the rise of fascism in Europe, the limits of pulpit sermons—these gnawed at him. By 1936 he had left the ministry, moved to London, and joined the Communist Party.That same summer, Spain erupted. Franco and ...

leer en español        The Aragón plain is a land of heat and silence, broken by the rattle of cicadas and the occasional rush of a train along the Zaragoza–Huesca line. In August 1936, near the small town of Tardienta, a young Englishwoman fell under machine-gun fire. Her name was Felicia Browne—the first British volunteer to die in the Spanish Civil War, and the only British woman to fight as a combatant.Born in Surrey, in 1904, Felicia grew up in a comfortable household but refused the expected path. At sixteen she entered the Slade School of Art, precociously gifted, restless, and impatient with convention. By 1928 she was in Berlin, studying sculpture and apprenticed to a stonemason. There she witnessed the rise of Nazism at close quarters, leaving behind her tools and unfinished work...

leer en español        My name is Sangay Tzondru. It means the Buddha of Perseverance. The name was given to me by Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey, my teacher when a did a course in Buddhism in Dharamsala, home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan community that had fled from the Chinese over the high peaks of the Himalayas to India.I was taking a sabbatical from my career as a journalist and lent my scant editing skills to the team of scholars translating the dharma into English. We met with the Dalai Lama every Wednesday and reported our progress over buttery tea and plates of barfi, Indian sweets made from coconut, cardamom and buffalo milk.With a Tibetan student at Delhi University translating, I made a collection of folk tales that I turned into the book, Stories From Beyond the Clouds. It was pu...