On the last day of the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party [Feb. 14–25, 1956] of the Soviet Union the doors were closed. Delegates were forbidden from taking notes. There was no stenographer and there was to be no discussion. It was then that Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party, delivered his paper […]
Denis Brutus, born in 1924 in what was then British Rhodesia to South African parents, shot to prominence (and jail) in the 1960s campaigning for a boycott of South Africa in the sporting world. A veteran activist, poet and Professor of African Studies and African Literature, Brutus continues to campaign vigorously against economic injustice. His […]
Nearly a dozen countries have ratified the treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe with hardly a whisper of controversy; two electorates reject it and there is a storm of breast beating and rending of garments. Why? Why? Why did no one ask why so many countries – including Spain, which even held a referendum – […]
In the dead of night, two weeks before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, five people broke into Shannon airport in the west of Ireland. Although Shannon airport is not a military base and Ireland was and remains officially at peace with Iraq, they found a US war plane and, according to charges brought against […]
“One of the interesting things about biography is its limits. You can make educated guesses but you can never really know people’s motivations and desires. People aren’t necessarily conscious of the motives which drive them. It’s very easy to rationalise anything we want or that is in our interest, no matter how it appears to […]
In 1956 M. King Hubbert predicted that oil production in the US states (the 48 lower US states to be precise) would peak in the early 1970s. His pronouncement was greeted with derision but proved quite accurate. He also predicted that world oil production would peak in the 1990s – not knowing then that the […]
Some people seem to take pleasure in boasting about how long it takes them to drive to work. Like the Yorkshire men in the Monty Python sketch, they get up half an hour before going to bed the night before in order to arrive at work on time in the morning. They live, for the […]
The golem, an artificial man made by moulding clay into the shape of a man and reciting spells over it, has been described by Isaac Bashevis Singer as “the very essence of Jewish folklore”. Yet he has travelled far beyond the boundaries of Jewish folklore, starring on the silver screen and in Marvell comics, and […]
Nearly five hundred years before the Russian serfs were emancipated, WatTyler demanded that “no man should be a serf, nor do homage or any mannerof service to any lord” and that no one should serve any man but at hisown will. Later on, but still before the Reformation, the Czech Taboritessought to abolish power and […]
Czesław Miłosz, Nobel prize winning Polish poet, died on August 14th aged 93. Born into the intelligentsia, his was a formidable intellect, and there is something forbidding about his meditations on philosophy and literature – though he claimed to be neither philosopher nor literary critic. He said that if writing was to be a pleasure […]
