Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2010) Paperback £9.99 stg.
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People, an academically minded historical work that nonetheless spent nineteen weeks on the bestseller list in Israel, is a book that is much more incendiary than it ought to be. Sand’s basic thesis – that [...]

Book Review: Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek (Verso, 2010)
Reading Žižek has always been as challenging as it is enjoyable, an experience of pleasure and pain that seems at times an intellectual correlate to the operation of objet petit a (little object a). The concept of objet petit a has been a constant in [...]

Gaza via London
Oh child of chance,
Oh blasted child,
Fair as ever anything,
Universe of wasted grace.
Kneeling now and always now
In your ruined house
Hearing troops of a general doom
Whistling with purpose
While priming their mortars for you.

The Invention of Paris, A History in Footsteps: Eric Hazan | Verso (2010) pp400 (£20)
There are few cities in the world as indelibly branded, in both a commercial and a figurative sense, in the minds of people as Paris. This is all thanks to a handful of iconic monuments made famous from millions upon millions [...]

Radical Irish Lives: Peadar O’Donnell by Donal Ó’Drisceoil - Cork University Press
The recent reportage of the teachers’ unions conferences would have delighted Peadar O’Donnell, who began his career as an activist in the INTO. The general tenor of the media response was ‘how dare these people object to having their pay slashed and conditions of [...]

The recent tragic killing of Toyosi Shittabey behooves us all to critically reflect upon, and engage in national dialogue about, the true scale and nature of racism in Irish society today. The pervasiveness of racism in Irish society is a reality that a number of young people in the Tyrellstown area—where Toyosi was killed—have eloquently [...]

Fordlandia: the rise and fall of Henry Ford’s forgotten jungle city by Greg Grandin, Metropolitan Books, New York 2009
This book uncovers the complex history of Henry Ford’s attempt to create a secure source of natural latex in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1920s and ‘30s.  But it also reveals the complex and often contradictory character [...]

I’ve always found dubious the notion that certain times in the past were ‘a more innocent age’; it is bandied about a lot when referring to the more demure sexual mores of times gone, the 1950s being the prime example. Of course the ‘innocence’ of comely young ladies (and it is nearly always ladies who [...]