“They make no attempt to hide their opinion of the shop’s past They want to get things right from now on. After years of incompetence, Foyles still has a very good name.”. Thorvald the Far-Farer was a highly unusual Icelander. Rejecting the thuggish rough justice of pagan Viking gods, he converted to Christianity in the 990s, accompanied a missionary bishop and preached the gospel. Stoned, outlawed and even accused of homosexuality, he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Victoria Clark, fascinated by the journey, decided to do the same 1,000 years on, comparing the preoccupations of today’s Europeans to those of the 11th century
Thorvald the Far-Farer was a highly unusual Icelander.
On her way, she is helped by an almost equally interesting assortment of modern characters: an Icelander who has a museum of phalluses, a melancholic East German devoted to magnificently medieval Quedlinburg, ebullient Italians in Bari, an amorous Syrian who chases her round Krak des Chevaliers, the great Crusader castle.What interests Clark is religion: its all-encompassing importance in Thorvald’s time and its dramatic decline in Western Europe today. As well as visiting churches, mosques and synagogues and sitting through two audiences with Pope John Paul, she meets committed Christians of different persuasions: a young French monk in the Taiz?ommunity; the Orthodox Archbishop Yannoulatos; Padre Domenico, a lone Italian priest in Antioch; and Sister Rita, a Palestinian nun.It’s a noble theme. The trouble is that Clark seems to have cooked up a Grand Universal Theory before her journey and is hell-bent on proving that the 11th century “laid the essential groundwork for the rest of the second millennium with its eventual removal of religion from its central place”. Proving this leads to laboured links, unconvincing parallels and ostrich-like reactions to the many intelligent thinkers she meets, who, with remarkable courtesy, totally disagree with her.By the last page, she has settled for the somewhat facile conclusion that “it may be that the terrible lesson Western Europe’s 11th century taught us is that man is a greater danger to himself than the hostile universe will ever be”, never more so than when “motivated by blind belief in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Communism, National Socialism or global capitalism, all faces of the opposite of love, egoism”.Never mind. It is not the moral meaning Clark imposes on her journey, but the journey itself that makes her book fascinating. Stuffed with funny and almost photographically vivid portraits of the citizens of Europe today, and interwoven with startling brief lives of a clutch of formidable men and women from the past, it makes us realise how similar humans of every time and place can be.. Feel troubled about investing your money in companies that make guns or cigarettes? There are thousands of private investors who do, which has fuelled the growth of an “ethical investment” industry over the past few years.
When ethical funds, also known as “socially responsible investment” (SRI), took off in the 1990s, the feeling was there were not enough whiter-than-white companies to invest in to allow individuals to have a balanced portfolio of shares. So many managers of ethical funds made it clear to investors they would plough their money into companies they regarded as the least harmful to the environment or local communities. That was coupled with a policy of being a thorn in the side of these companies, in a bid further to improve their record.The policy struck a chord with investors and has made millions of pounds of profits from management fees for fund managers.Such was the demand for ethical investment that FTSE, the UK’s main share index, created “FTSE4Good” in 2001, four indices of shares which takes in only companies which have met its ethical guidelines. Mark Makepeace, chief executive of FTSE said: “SRI has increased by over 1000 per cent in the last four years.