Castro comes to visit
In 1971, Fidel Castro went to Chile as a guest of its new president Salvador Allende. The Cuban leader left with a gloomy view of the prospects for the first democratically-elected Marxist government in the Americas. Confiding to associates in private, Castro predicted the tragic defeat of Allende’s Popular Unity experiment two [...]

Victor Pelevin - Faber & Faber, 2008
Towards the end of the film The Lives of Others, the dissident writer Georg Dreyman, who has out-lasted the Stasi and its state to find a comfortable perch in the new Germany, happens across his one-time persecutor from the DDR hierarchy. The impotent apparatchik can’t resist taunting Dreyman - [...]

If, like me, you have read Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception, and Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Dissemination from cover to cover, and all just out of curiosity, then I think it’s fair to say that 1: You’re a div, 2: You’re a div [...]

The first decade of the millennium has seen an intense focus on the politics of the Middle East. Not that the region was considered insignificant at any time since the Second World War. But a series of events that include the 9/11 attacks, the second intifada, America’s war in Iraq and the bloody confrontation between [...]

I’ve been promising/threatening to provide a review of David Graeber’s new book, Possibilities, for a few weeks, but a number of factors intervened to postpone it. First, a bunch of books arrived on my doorstep that demanded attention, not least because they touched on some of the issues dealt with in the Graeber book.
Second, [...]