First posted November 11, 2016 A few weeks ago, five people who were selling papers outside Hyde Park were arrested by the police for obstruction. When taken before the magistrates, they were all found guilty, four of them being bound over for six months and the other sentenced to forty shillings fine or a month’s… Read More George Orwell: Freedom of the Park (1945)
Trent Zimmerman As we farewell 2022, many of the world’s citizens will be hoping for a better new year. It is hard to look back on the past year – indeed couple of years – without a high degree of angst about the direction of our global community. We have been battered by a pandemic… Read More I find hope in people who show the best of humanity
First posted January 13, 2013 NB: These extracts are from the Book within a Book in Chapter 9 of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; first published in 1949. Sixty fours years later, the dystopian vision contained in the book throws light on the contemporary world, its fascination with war, violence and the fanatical ideologies that justify a continuous system of thought… Read More Ignorance is Strength; Freedom is Slavery; War is Peace
By Dave Kindy’ On Christmas Eve 1944, heavy snow blanketed the Hürtgen Forest in Germany, near the Belgian border. Inside a tiny cabin deep in the woods, 12-year-old Fritz Vincken and his mother, Elisabeth, listened to warplanes and artillery shells as the Battle of the Bulge neared its climax. As they tried to make the most… Read More U.S. and German soldiers shared Christmas Eve dinner at height of WWII
Max Porter As I lie down under a 2,000-year-old small-leaved lime coppice, I contemplate what is truly sacred This is me trying to have a sacred encounter with the 2,000-year-old small-leaved lime coppice at Westonbirt Arboretum. Because of my terrible hunched posture I’m always looking for an opportunity to lie down and alleviate the pain in my… Read More In an ancient forest, I look for peace, but instead I find Happy the puppy
Papyrus by Irene Vallejo review – how books built the world What do you give the queen who has everything? When Mark Antony was wondering how to impress Cleopatra in the run-up to the battle of Actium in 31BC, he knew that jewellery would hardly cut it. The queen of the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt… Read More The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
NB It is evident that the Taliban’s version of orthodox Islam treats women as second class beings, as children of a lesser God. All believers ought to either renounce these beliefs as inhuman, or hang their heads in shame. DS Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have ordered an indefinite ban on university education for the country’s women,… Read More Taliban ban Afghan women from university education
Emine Saner It was when Mehret Biruk lost two hours of her life to Instagram that she knew the time had come to escape. What had she been looking at? She couldn’t even remember in the moments immediately afterwards. Instagram, she recalls thinking, was “winning the war on my attention”. The irony was that Biruk… Read More What it’s like to have a social media detox
Stanislav Markelov First posted February 21, 2019 When a nation is filled with strife, then do patriots flourish: Lao-Tzu, Chinese Philosopher (601-531 BC) This is the last article written by Russian activist lawyer Stanislav Markelov before he was shot dead in central Moscow a decade ago. On 19 January 2009, as Markelov and Baburova walked… Read More Patriotism as a diagnosis
Samuel Earle Faced with a future that presents itself as non-negotiable, the temptation is to turn towards the past First posted November 05, 2016 When Harry Potter discovers the Mirror of Erised in The Philosopher’s Stone—amirror that shows us our deepest dreams—he repeatedly returns to it in secret. Each night in its reflection he lives his… Read More The politics of nostalgia
After the truth-shower 