Between Victory and Defeat

How can the left escape burnout? Hannah Proctor; Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat SAM ADLER-BELL the left can sometimes become “more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is thus caught… Read More Between Victory and Defeat

The Captive Mind revisited

First posted January 24, 2017 The Captive Mind (1953) has been compared to the two most revealing and penetrating works on the same subject previously published – Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. Read an interview with him in 2003, the year before he died. The… Read More The Captive Mind revisited

Alice Munro obituary

Few writers have possessed the short-story format as thoroughly as the Canadian author and Nobel laureate Alice Munro, who has died aged 92. Sarah A Smith Although her early years as a writer were clouded by the feeling, partly the result of pressure from her publishers, that she should concentrate on producing a novel, she never… Read More Alice Munro obituary

Hilary Mantell: Springtime for Robespierre

First posted August 29, 2013 Robespierre  Edited by Colin Haydon and William DoyleReviewed by Hilary Mantell In the two years following the taking of the Bastille, he pursued an impeccably liberal and far-sighted agenda. He spoke for manhood suffrage and against a property qualification for voters; against slavery; in support of civil rights for Jews; against capital punishment; and… Read More Hilary Mantell: Springtime for Robespierre

Anne Lamott on love, sobriety and reaching 70: ‘All I’ve learned, I’ve learned because the abyss swallowed me’

I feel about Christians the way everybody feels about Christians. I love what Gandhi said, that he loved Christ, but it was Christians he had a problem with, and that’s totally how I feel about it. Katherine Rowland Your book launched last month and the next day you celebrated your 70th birthday. Does that number carry… Read More Anne Lamott on love, sobriety and reaching 70: ‘All I’ve learned, I’ve learned because the abyss swallowed me’

Sunset of the Century

Rabindranath Tagore (Written in Bengali on December 31, 1899) THE LAST SUN of the century sets amidst the blood-red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred. The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses of vengeance. The… Read More Sunset of the Century

गांधी का हत्यारा गोड़से: नाथूराम की ज़िंदगी और उसके सपनों का भारत

Book Launch: Tuesday May 7; 5.30 pm; Jawahar Bhawan; Rajendra Prasad Road Gandhi’s Assassin. By Dhirendra K Jha ‘The Poets of Rapallo’ Review: Ezra Pound’s Fascist Paradise Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia is a warning against resurgent fascism Christopher Bollas: The fascist state of mind (1992) Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion (1921) Against homogenisation: Advancing diversity through Democratic Confederalism Ten Theses… Read More गांधी का हत्यारा गोड़से: नाथूराम की ज़िंदगी और उसके सपनों का भारत