With the release of the Afghan and Iraq War Diaries earlier this year and the current release of 250,000 confidential US Embassy cables, who at the end of 2010 does not know the name of Julian Assange and the associated website WikiLeaks? Officially launched in 2007, WikiLeaks state that its aim is to ‘bring important [...]

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, edited by Slavoj Žižek (Verso)
Hitchcock, piece by piece, by Laurent Bouzereau (Abrams)
Alfred Hitchcock Masters of the Cinema, by Krohn (Phaidon)
Hitchcock 14-Disc Box Set (Universal Pcitures)

Like a biro that leaks into a valued item of dress, some things [...]

Interview:
Dave Lordan: You’ve just put out ‘A Sacrament of Song’ with Kit Fryatt’s Wurm Press. It’s a brilliantly uplifting chapbook. Tell us a bit about it?
Karl Parkinson: Well, firstly, I’m very happy that Wurm have done this for me. I’d like to think that it is uplifting and as the title suggests, [...]

Book Review: Gideon Levy, The Punishment of Gaza (London: Verso, 2010)
Gideon Levy is a veteran journalist and columnist with the liberal Israeli daily, Ha’aretz.  Along with Amira Hass, he is one of the few Israeli journalists - one of the few Western journalists - to take a long term interest in the Gaza Strip.  His [...]

Book Review:Yeats and Violence: Michael Wood (Oxford University Press, 2010)
Violence moves restlessly through Yeats’ poetry.  It is there in ‘The Magi‘ (written in 1913) with its Three Kings who ‘Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied’ wait for something more, another disturbance of the world order, a revelation of sorts, intimating an appetite for violence.
The violence in [...]

Book Review:The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough, (2009) Verso.
It isn’t entirely clear why Verso thought now would be a good time to publish a book of extracts from the writings of the Situationists about the urban environment and experience. Editor Tom McDonough, whose excellent introductory essay renders much of the subsequent material [...]

The title of this wee piece scans a little like a football chant. That might, at least at the start, make it easier reading for Ian O’Doherty of The Irish Independent. But it’s mainly a direct reply to his article today on asylum-seekers in Mosney, “It’s not racist to say sorry we’re full“.
There is a [...]

Book Review: Ireland’s Economic Crash, by Kieran Allen, The Liffey Press
Kieran Allen’s excellent analysis of Ireland’s recession, the first that this writer has encountered from an Irish Marxist, is predicated on a single simple truth: Since 1970, in the worldwide capitalist system, profits have been falling. For example, ‘the profit rate in 1997 was only [...]

This article is a slightly edited version of a presentation I gave at the Equality in a Time of Crisis conference, organized by the UCD Egalitarian World Initiative (EWI) and the UCD School of Social Justice in UCD last week.
The issues raised by an agenda of workplace equality have urgent implications for trade unionists.
By [...]

John Barry is Associate Director of the Institute for a Sustainable World and Reader in Politics both at Queen’s University Belfast.  He was educated at University College Dublin and the University of Glasgow.  From 2003-2009 he was co-chair of the Green Party in Northern Ireland and was a key figure in the creation of an [...]