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The Ironist is dedicated to exploring irony wherever it occurs. We have a range of essays and stories which cover historical, artistic, and contemporary life and events. We welcome your comments, support and submissions.
Wings of Gold: Angels in Byzantine Art
This final essay traces how artists dressed the divine in imperial robes, gold sashes, and red shoes, and produced, in the Angel with the Golden Hair, one of the most beautiful faces ever painted. In the previous essay, we traced how Pseudo-Dionysius organized the...
WORDS, WORDS, WORDS IV: On Reading
Peter writes his fourth essay on the love of reading and the perils of speedreading. Read on! Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my...
Irony Club Open Mic III with Mayil Alfaaz | 26 July 5:30 pm
Alfaaz means, simply, words. And words, read aloud and in good company, are the whole of what we’re after this month. On the evening of July 26, The Irony Club is opening the mic again, and this time we’re widening it considerably. It will run the way an open mic...
The Celestial Bureaucracy: Hierarchies of Angels
In her third post, Dr. Hara tells us how Seraphim came to outrank Cherubim, and Archangels ended up near the bottom. In the previous essay, we traced the angel’s transformation from local guardian spirit to cosmic warrior under the influence of Zoroastrian dualism....
Horizon in Their Hands
Nigel writes about his experience at an exhibition at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture - Ithra Centre in Dhrahan, Saudi Arabia. The View, by Rima Mardam Bey, 1983 During my visit to Saudi Arabia this year, I went to an exhibition of women artists (Horizon...
From San Blas to Oxford: A Review of Shooting Up
A missionary family raises four boys in one of Madrid's most drug-ravaged neighbourhoods. Jonathan Tepper's memoir traces an extraordinary journey. Jonathan Tepper’s Shooting Up is much more than the account of four brothers in a missionary family growing up in Spain...
WORDS, WORDS, WORDS III
Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord. (Hamlet, II, ii) As part of The Ironist’s continuing series of articles on language and...
From Ahura Mazda to Lucifer: Angels and the Dualism of Good and Evil
The second part of Dr. Hara's series on angels traces how Zoroastrian dualism handed the cosmos its central plot - good versus evil. In the previous essay, we traced the lineage of the guardian spirit from Sumerian temple guardian to Assyrian colossal. Yet that...
Polite Revolutions: A Gentleman in Moscow and the Comforts of Confinement
First a bestseller and now a prestige television series, A Gentleman in Moscow invites us to believe that grace and civility might yet survive the twentieth century’s great undoing. Picture Credits: Amazon Some months ago, I read A Gentleman in Moscow during a...