January 2015

The deeper one looks in To the Lighthouse the more one sees. The more one listens the more one hears. Homer, Shakespeare, Conrad and Forster are just some of the ancestral voices commenting on war.

I suppose the early stage of a journey down a pharmacological rabbit hole is as good a time as any to take in the baked, surreal ruin of Hadrian’s Villa. Crumbling, desiccated, plundered, immense and ancient, the place rambled on for what seemed like miles.

The rich get rich through wealth extraction, not wealth creation. It’s time that was put to an end.

What might a Marx for the twenty-first century, a #Marx21c, look like? Perhaps as different to that of the nineteenth century as this era is from that one.

The dissent of students to the dominance of neoclassical economics in the curriculum is not new. As early as 2000, a group of French students organized under the name ‘Post-Autistic Economics’.

To distinguish between “good riots” like in Boston and the “bad riots” in Ferguson is itself an exercise in historical amnesia practiced by the left and right.

A taste for rural scenes, in the present state of society, appears to be very often an artificial sentiment, rather inspired by poetry and romances, than a real perception of the beauties of nature. But, as it is reckoned a proof of refined taste to praise the calm pleasures...

A public event celebrating the recent boom in online criticism, and encouraging readers to get involved in the growth of digital literary culture. Panelists David Winters, Robert Barry, Marc Farrant, Russell Bennetts, Tariq Goddard and Michael Bhaskar.

They dig and the earth is sweet. The Hackney Hole is eight square metres, straight down through the lawn of a decommissioned rectory. This secret garden is separated from St Augustine’s Tower by a high wall of darkly weathered brick.

If love were not always a step ahead, how would it ensure we kept up the chase? True love is the One we keep returning to.

The qualifying poem by each of these finalists will be published at Berfrois in the coming two weeks. Each finalist has submitted four more poems to Berfrois, and the winner of the 2015 Berfrois Poetry Prize will be selected on the basis of the finalists’ five-poem portfolios.

In her latest book, ‘Unspeakable Things’, journalist Laurie Penny dissects the structural violence ripping through the most intimate parts of all of our lives: suffocated by rigid gender roles, policed by the sexual counter-revolution, and corroded by austerity – and charts the dynamics between these controlling forces in our...

Ours is a generation raised in the ‘80s and ‘90s, on a diet of The Simpsons and South Park, for whom postmodern irony and cynicism is a default setting, something ingrained in us.

Over the past few years I have become more involved in what is called the 'art world': promoting and participating in the creation of objects that are, when completed, deemed to belong to that special, narrow class of physical entities at least some people agree to call 'artworks'.