The Man with the Blue Guitar, was a poem written in the 1937 by American poet Wallace Stevens. Stevens was certainly not a Marxist. Yet it is a work which I find politically thought provoking. It seems to offer something about what it means to be a revolutionary – about the ambiguity of engaging vigorously with the world [...]
Two events, at each end of the last week here in London, have highlighted the real range of activities and viewpoints of the left community in this country. The 7th annual Historical Materialism Conference, held last weekend at SOAS and Birkbeck, offered a fantastic opportunity for over 700 attendees from around the world to discuss [...]
One of the above images appeared, at the turn of the century, in an anti-Semitic Austrian newspaper. One of the images, however, is a contemporary portrayal of the legendary tight fisted businessman, Scrooge. It has gone up on posters across the London Underground – and elsewhere – to advertise Disney’s new animated version of the [...]
On Friday the London Review of Books will celebrate its 30th anniversary with a bumper length edition and the launch of the magazine’s online archive comprising no less than 30 million words in 12,000 essays by more than 2,000 contributors.
I started reading the LRB the year after I left university, while working in Hong Kong as a secondary school teacher. With no marking to do, few lessons to teach and no extra-curricula activities to oversee, my timetable might have been gratifyingly blank but for the school’s draconian (at least as it seemed to me at the time) working culture. Teachers, when not in the classroom, were forbidden from leaving their desks in the staffroom, much less the school, during working hours. It was bad form to turn off your computer or to use it to play videos or computer games (though such programmes were far beyond the capabilities of my laptop which wheezed whenever asked to load so much as a picture or the bright, gurning dragon school logo on the screensaver). ‘You have to appear to work at all times’ an experienced TEFL teacher had counselled me, ‘which is why I choose a desk at the back of the room. They can’t see the screen that way.’
But I couldn’t get my desk moved and with the Head of English seated behind me I had to be careful what I looked at. Too long surfing the BBC Sport’s website inevitably led to the questions like, ‘Hey what you doing?’ or ‘Hey, Lazy, you want do some marking?’
Mercifully at some point I stumbled upon the LRB’s website. It remains one of the best presented and easy to use sites on the net and, wondrously, it had no slow to load, easy to condemn, pictures. Reading the LRB I looked like I was working. Sometimes I even felt like I was, but not too often. Plus I learned stuff, stopped reading my father’s Spectator, made ill advised friendships with people like Salman and took my first steps towards apparently continuous, unemployability…
To mark 30 years of LRB, I spoke to Senior Editor, Paul Myerscough, about where the magazine stands politically, how significant political essays can be, whether he’d noticed any changes to government policy following articles written in the magazine, ‘snark’ and what happened to Christopher Hitchens.
About a year ago I went to one of London’s more fashionable theatres to review the premiere of a play with impeccable credentials. It was the first translation of the work of a hip young German playwright: both production and direction were trendily minimalist, the weighty setting (Dresden during and after the War) was married [...]
Guest post by Ruth Lukom
A new coffee bar has opened at the bottom of our road. It is modern, stylish and the smell of coffee and cakes is very inviting. It is a Women Only café.
I live in Waltham Forest, an area with a high Muslim population. For the past 20 -30 years they were [...]
I’ve not written for a couple of weeks, mainly due to having to work like a bitch, so I really should probably write something cerebral about theory and socialism, but instead I’m opting to write about wool. Ok, so it’s not the most exciting thing in the world, and it comes free with sheep, but [...]
You are live on Channel 4, please do not swear. Wank! Unless you have tourettes. Shilpa poppadom, Shilpa chappawala! Fuck it, who cares, no one’s watching anyway.
Reports of Big Brother’s demise are not greatly exaggerated, though for a long time, they’ve been greatly anticipated. This week, programme makers, in one last desperate bid for viewers, [...]
Guest post by Thom Harrison
‘Suddenly I viddied what I had to do and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off forever out of this wicked cruel world. One moment of pain, perhaps, and then sleep forever and ever and ever.’
- Anthony Burgess: A [...]
