John Baker’s Blog

This is part of a flyer Barack Obama is using in Kentucky:
The words in the inset proclaim:

My faith teaches me that I can sit in church and pray all I want. But I won’t be fulfilling God’s will unless I go out and do the Lord’s work. Barack Obama.
On the rear of the flyer is [...]

Equus, Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play, tells the story of a psychiatrist who attempts to treat a young man convicted of blinding six horses.
Over the weekend we were lucky enough to catch the touring version at Sheffield’s Lyceum Theatre. The play opened at the National Theatre in 1973 and was subsequently performed all over the [...]

Henryk Sienkiewicz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905. He is best known for his epic historical novel Quo Vadis, which depicts the persecutions of the early Christians. There have been a couple of film adaptations of the novel, a Hollywood version in 1951 and another from Poland in 2001.
Sienkiewicz was born in [...]

The prostitute is an old and venerable figure in social and sexual history. In our culture we despise and abuse her while imprisoning her in the grip of a sentimental and romantic image. The growing child will be fed images of prostitutes who are murdered or savagely disfigured and the official representatives of justice, the [...]