Both Perestroika and Thatcherism, then, meant scaling back economic and social security to drive efficiency gains and shift labor and capital from declining to rising industries. If this similarity between East and West is unsettling to readers today, it is nonetheless one that, as Bartel’s archival work demonstrates, was recognized behind closed doors at the… Read More No Alternative?
Yet Orwell has shaped his life. “My father was devoted to me,” he says. “Absolutely devoted.” And Blair is equally devoted to him. He regards himself as the keeper of the sacred flame for his father. ‘My father was devoted to me’ … Blair with Orwell. Photograph: Vernon Richards Richard Blair didn’t have the easiest start in life. At three… Read More George Orwell and me: Richard Blair on life with his extraordinary father
Hannah Jane Parkinson Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, in which Crimson is set. Photograph: Alamy One has to understand Greenland to understand the excitement that greeted Niviaq Korneliussen’s debut when it was published there in 2014 as Homo Sapienne. Crimson, which came out of Korneliussen’s success in a short story competition, tells the tale of four queer characters… Read More Crimson by Niviaq Korneliussen review – rage and queer romance under an icy sun
Situationist International and the Students of Strasbourg November 1966 On the Poverty of Student Life: The Little Pamphlet that Started a Revolution The Situationist International (SI) was founded in 1957 by a half-dozen European avant-garde artists. Recent historical events, chiefly workers uprisings in East Germany, Poland and Hungary, convinced them that a social revolution was… Read More On the Poverty of Student Life Considered in its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Especially Intellectual Aspects, with a Modest Proposal for Doing Away With It (Strasbourg, 1966)
Jonathan Steele For a man who once told his friend Beatrice Webb that he “disliked the profession of diplomacy”, Ivan Maisky was an unusually brilliant practitioner of the art of being an ambassador. Spending 11 years as Stalin’s representative in London, between 1932 and 1943, Maisky not only had his hands full in trying to… Read More The Maisky Diaries review – Britain’s high and mighty in conversation with Stalin’s man
1/ He went to bed, turned on the BBC World News and switched it off again. Half-truths. Quarter-truths. What the world really knows about itself, it doesn’t dare say. John le Carre, Our Kind of Traitor; 2011, p 241 2/ We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with… Read More Reflections on ideology, morality and conscience
Readers outside of India can donate here to support Mainstream Weeklyhttps://tinyurl.com/2rsy4ss6++++++ In this issue: DOCUMENTS: BOOKS: IMAGE & SOUND: Editor’s Picks Books of Note
The problem is becoming worse than the condition of inter-passivity, with student disengagement now often leading to mass chronic non-attendance in lectures and seminars. Rather than go through the motions of learning, many students simply do not bother to go through the motions, except to submit essays and often that is done with the assistance… Read More Apathy and the neoliberal university
readers finally glimpse the exceptional man who turned poetry into a panoramic mirror for all of humanity — Bryce Christensen Stephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard professor who “knows more about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did” (John Leonard, Harper’s), has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how… Read More Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
Nothing has so radically transformed the world as the distinction between true and false religion NB: This is one of the most thought-provoking studies in the history and philosophy of religion that – in my limited reading – I have come across. The author Jan Assman (1938-2024) was a German Egyptologist, cultural historian, and religion… Read More The Price of Monotheism
After the truth-shower 