Tuesday, Feb 7th 2012
In the presence of the gentry, Old Kenny the peasant, doffed his cap, crooked his knee, arranged his face in an expression of obsequious servility and said: ‘Savin’ yer presence, yer honours, but sure ’tis all our own fault, for we’re a feckless nation an’ not used at all at all to the ways of [...]
I read the above book over the Christmas period by Caroline Moorehead. I could not put the book down as it was an account of women mainly Communist women who initially fought against the Nazi’s and the filthy French traitors who helped the Germans during that country’s terrible occupation in 1939.
The book reminded me of [...]
Book Review: Prison Notebooks: Volume II, Antonio Gramsci
“The concepts of revolutionary and internationalist, in the modern sense, are correlated to the precise concept of state and class: a poor understanding of the state means a poor consciousness of class (understanding of the state exists not only when one defends it but also when one attacks [...]
Book Review: Hilary Wainwright, Reclaim the state: experiments in popular democracy. London / New York / Calcutta: Seagull (2nd edition - 2009).
A new book by Hilary Wainwright is usually a significant event: Beyond the Fragments (with Sheila Rowbotham and Lynne Segal, 1979), Arguments for a New Left (1994) and the first edition of Reclaim the [...]
Album Review: Arise and Go, Stephen James Smith and Enda Reilly, 2011 (on iTunes, on Facebook).
Stephen James Smith- SJS to the scene- is one of the wonderboys of Irish Spoken Word. I first met him at the Electric Picnic in 2007. He made a beeline for me after I had finished a performance on Marty Mulligan’s [...]
Book Review: ‘On the State of Egypt- The Issues that Caused the Revolution‘, Alaa Al Aswany (AUB Press 2011)
David Lynch is currently based in Cairo reporting on post-Mubarak Egypt and the Arab Spring. He is blogging at Arab Spring in My Step.
Massive social phenomena are not easily predicted.
The CIA for instance, was pumped full of [...]
Book Review: Britain’s Empire, Richard Gott (Verso 2011)
Hegel’s metaphor about the awareness that comes only after the event – ‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk’ - might encourage the thought that finally we are able to look back at the British empire and draw some [...]
A review of Ghost Estate by William Wall, Published by Salmon Poetry 2011
‘…& are we supposed to sympathise
when the gentry find themselves
in the same boat
or plane
as everyone else?’
From ‘Job in Heathrow’
William Wall is a novelist, poet and blogger. I better ‘fess up straight away that ever since I read William’s Booker Prize long- listed [...]
Book Review: Words of a Rebel, Peter Kropotkin (1885, this edition published in 1997)
History is interwoven with the plight of our times - a hereditary restriction of the masses which allows the supremacist authority of the rulers. Our disassociation from past struggles has ensured that humanity, subjugated through capitalism, has betrayed the nature of revolution. Capitalism [...]
Book Review: The Ask, Sam Lipsyte (2010)
Milo Burke is a man in distress. He’s a man who was whelped in a liberal college that let him believe he was the future of visual art, but now he’s stuck raising the money for another such institution to prop upsimilar self-delusions. But he’s not very good at [...]
