THE DELIGHT OF PENMANSHIP
The World of Writing
THE DELIGHT OF PENMANSHIP
October 2026
Introduction
Most of us have our favourite things.
We have our favourite books, favourite passages that might cover two or three pages at most, and in just the same way as we have our favourite recordings of music, our favourite paintings, prints and photographs.
It is part of our secret world. Not deliberately clandestine in some furtive sense, but because we don’t like being an open book.
I
When we look across many decades we recall this favourite penmanship, often from a century or more ago.
We don’t make a song or dance of it. We do not tell anyone. We do it indirectly, usually through our shelves, those silent records of our innermost self, our thinking, our beliefs, our anger, our rebellion even. A shelf in every house is nothing less than that person’s or family’s biography. How wonderful to behold.
II
This platform - The World of Writing - is simply a collection of some of my favourite passages that have greatly benefited and enriched my life. Many of the books are now out of print. The authors have been dead for more than a century, several centuries, even millennia. Yet their penmanship remains. This is vital. True freedom and true democracy allow us to express ourselves.
III
When we burn books we know that in time we will burn people. That has been a pattern of every century, and especially the 20th century.
We who live in the 21st century, especially the generation born since 2000, it is easy in some parts of the world to think that the burning of books is an old concept, without meaning, and which we have left when the last century closed.
But even as I write, Russia is targeting all of the libraries and universities in Ukraine with the specific intent of burning Ukrainian books and bringing about the destruction of the written Ukrainian language. Remove a nation’s language and you remove their identity. their reason for existence. That is how dastardly human nature is.
Adolf Hitler did this. Lenin did this. That tyrant Stalin did this. mao Tse Tung. The list is endless. The trump Regime is hollowing out its libraries and universities in exactly the same way.
To every nation remember this chilling maxim:
“Today we will burn books. Tomorrow we will burn the authors of those books. Then we will burn the people en masse.”
IV
Let us never forget this.
When we are in our teens and twenties we are far too busy and there are not enough hours in the day. But the Arts, in so many forms and which include writing, have their impact upon us. We do not know it.
We discover this only many years later. We come across a poet we studied at school and suddenly two or three lines of a stanza are there before our eyes and we inwardly rejoice, we have that sense of thrill and discovery that somehow even in our teens we could see what the poet was expressing and why he or she was so doing in with such incredible beauty of language.
“... the lamps in England lighted,
And Evening wrecked on Wales.”
I end with those two lines by Housman. I was fifteen when I read his works and A Shropshire Lad. And that last line I could not get out of my head. I had seen it. Many times. So I walked back across the Cleeve Hill Escarpment towards Cleeve Cloud and the Three Sisters. I sat quietly as the sun set beyond my horizon, slightly to its descending arc the outline of the Malvern Hills. At first, a light or two. Then, as the Malvern darkened the lamps in England lighted… what a sight…
I glanced to the left. Wales was clear, proud and very beautiful. The clouds moved with great speed from the east, darkening as they did so …
I became transfixed.
Mr God!
And Evening wrecked on Wales
27 October 2026.
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Liverpool and Gloucestershire.
© 2026 Kenneth Th Webb
