The behaviour of the EU states towards Greece is inexplicable in the terms in which the EU defines itself. It is, first and foremost, a failure of solidarity. The ‘austerity package’, as the newspapers like to call it, seeks to impose on Greece terms that no people can accept. Even now the schools are running […]
Mark Lanegan is a little like one of those hybrid electric cars – a great idea on paper but one that never seems to have had the legs (or wheels) to take off into the stratosphere of greatness. His profile should be much greater than it is really, given the enormity of musical success he […]
“A poem often has a moment or a movement or an image, to deal with, not a whole series or interrelated and elaborated sequences, nor that sense of duration and vicarious experience that the novel brings. The best a novel can do is use its superstructure, all those cumulative bits of housekeeping, to achieve poem-moments, […]
While Irish and Italian citizens participated in the protests against the US SOPA / PIPA bills, it seems that their own Governments are in the process of introducing very similar measures – perhaps even harsher. The Irish government is acting in the wake of a court case (EMI and Others Vs UPC) where record companies […]
Tuscany’s success in presenting itself as the ideal Italian destination is legendary. To the British it’s affectionately known as ‘chiantishire’, while for thousands of American and European readers it is linked indelibly with the romantic vision presented by Frances Mayes in Under a Tuscan Sun. The irony of it all is that the very things […]
“When she woke, she was Red. Not flushed, not sunburned, but the solid, declarative red of a stop sign. She saw her hands first. She held them in front of her eyes, squinting up at them. For a few seconds, shadowed by her eyelashes and backlit by the hard white light emanating from the ceiling, […]
I remember the first time I saw Nosferatu. I was 15 and in the full throws of gothic angst – complete with importance, poetry and pianos. The dramatic German Expressionist stylings of Murnau’s Carpathian landscape, therefore, offered the ideal genre –especially when it came to an extremely teen-friendly subject…..vampires. Made in 1921 in the extremely […]
‘I think I’m mostly inspired by emotional and existential topics, either my own or people around me’, muses Ane Brun, the Norwegian songstress as she reflects on everything from poetry in politics to racism and fantasy collaborations. Having recorded nine albums since her debut album Spending Time with Morgan in 2002, it’s fair to say that […]
WordPress has mushroomed in size over the last couple of years, and its estimated that 22 in every 100 new domains registered in the States are running wordpress. And it’s not only small bloggers and internet marketers running the software – they claim that 14.7% of the top million websites are using their free open […]
The prize-winning Spanish novelist Lucía Etxebarria has, apparently, decided to pack in her career writing books after having discovered that more copies of it had been illegally downloaded than had actually been sold. Etxebarria, whose first book was a biography of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, and who has won both the Premio Nadal and the […]
