First posted on January 24, 2017 By CZESLAW MILOSZ Translated by Louis Iribarne Milosz’s poem has been described as one of the most moving tributes to the Holocaust victims ever written In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori baskets of olives and lemons, cobbles spattered with wine and the wreckage of flowers. Vendors cover the trestles with… Read More Campo dei Fiori by Czeslaw Milosz
First posted September 17, 2017 NB: Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) was a Russian religious and political philosopher. He was among 160 non-communist intellectuals and scholars, deported from Russia in 1922 on Lenin’s orders (after interrogation by Felix Dzherjzinsky, of the secret police), for being spies and counter revolutionaries. Berdyaev had also been convicted of blasphemy for criticising the Russian… Read More Nikolai Berdyaev: The Religion of Communism (1931) / The Paradox of the Lie (1939)
First posted July 22, 2017 Ann O’Loughlin set off across the Soviet Union nearly 30 years ago, looking for adventure and a chance to practise her Russian. Instead, she met a fascinating stranger in a leather jacket in the next carriage … The Trans-Siberian railway, the greatest train journey in the world, is where our… Read More Ann O’Loughlin – How the Trans-Siberian railway became the love train
Kasia Delgado First posted September 7, 2019 Vladimir was sentenced to 10 years’ hard labour. Ivanna was Prisoner 108, and his secret correspondent. She looks back on a love affair with a man she never met In 1953, a young Ivanna Maszczak trudged through the Siberian labour camp in which she was serving a 10-year… Read More ‘I longed for the moment you would write’: The Gulag penpals whose love lasted 60 years
SHEKHAR GUPTA What Modi has been doing there is putting the monkey on the citizen’s back, by shifting the definition of the constitutional state from the government’s duties to the citizen. The rights, as Mahatma Gandhi said he’d tell you, will automatically follow. To understand this better, you need to Google the 42nd Amendment to… Read More Kartavya Path: ask not what Modi can do for you… ask what you can do for Modi’s India
To be human is to be artificial Bo Winegard The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.~Oscar Wilde That we should not lie is generally sound advice, though few of us are able to navigate life without uttering or affirming… Read More Against Authenticity
Ben Okri NB: This is a fascinating meditation, not merely on the Queen, but on God, monarchy, twentieth-century history and impermanence. Not to mention our regard for sheer human decency. Well written sir. DS Monarchs have passed away before, but there is something special which Queen Elizabeth has done, which makes it harder for the… Read More Queen Elizabeth was part of our psyche
Justin McCurry “It is broadly about what’s going on in the world … about the climate crisis and what we should do about it,” Saito said in an interview with the Guardian. “I advocate for degrowth and going beyond capitalism.” Kohei Saito’s book Capital in the Anthropocene has become an unlikely hit among young people… Read More Karl Marx in the Anthropocene: the post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan
The Champaran Satyagraha of 1917 brought the miseries of the region’s peasants to official notice. A volume of 165 testimonies of peasants translated into English is revealing of their wretched lives, but many aspects of the struggle remain unexplored and there remain gaps in our understanding. MOHAMMAD SAJJAD Thumb Printed: Champaran Indigo Peasants Speak to… Read More Book review: Chronicles of the Champaran Satyagraha
Andrew Gawthorpe In the end, Maga is nothing but a scam with hate in its heart and other people’s money in its pockets. By all appearances, Steve Bannon likes to think that he represents the soul of the Maga movement. He sees himself as a tireless champion of the common man, fighting their battles against… Read More Steve Bannon’s indictment reveals the truth about Trumpism
After the truth-shower 