There’s an aching feeling that war pulls everybody in terrible directions. Luke Buckmaster Jacob Elordi’s fine turn in complex, confronting war drama Many great directors have been attracted to war movies – or, as is the case with Australian auteur Justin Kurzel, a war-themed series, adapting Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep… Read More The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Arun Shourie on Savarkar, Hindutva and polarisation in India | BBC News India Arun Shourie, journalist, author, economist and former federal minister, speaks to the BBC’s Jugal Purohit about his new book ‘The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts. Shourie revisits the controversial legacy of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, his ideological opposition to Mahatma Gandhi, and… Read More Arun Shourie on Savarkar, Hindutva and polarisation in India | BBC News India
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
After the truth-shower 