One of mine and my friend Beth’s favourite pastimes is talking about all the weird, ill conceived and forgotten novels, primarily fantasy and dystopia, that we read as children and young teenagers. We were both extremely bookish in the way that only adolescents can be, reading indiscriminately and without coming up for air, plundering book shops, school and local libraries. Born two…
Until quite recently I rarely thought about the noughties. It was just a warehouse decade for my childhood, an apolitical sink hole of low rise jeans and foreign wars on terrestrial television. Nothing happened then- or, more correctly, nothing happened to me, which, when you’re 13, is the same thing. Of late, however, I have begun to think about the decade in…
Bertolt Brecht was one of the most innovative and unique cultural products of “the Left”, his work is the product of lived experiences in Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany, the United States, and the German Democratic Republic. Consequently, Brecht, politically and ideologically, inhabits a distinct space that has many lessons for socialism today. Brecht lived through multiple defeats of socialism in an age…
Harlan Ellison’s 1967 work “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” looms large on the internet. The Hugo award winning short story tells the tale of the only five people left alive after civilisation has been wiped out by a supercomputer called “AM”. Initially a weapons system in an escalated cold war (“Allied Mastercomputer”), AM becomes self aware (and namewise moves…
Opting to skip the national Vera Lynn karaoke session, my housemate and I instead chose to mark the 75th anniversary of VE day by watching a film of the period. After some deliberation, we plumped for a picture that shares its diamond anniversary with the end of the war, Ealing Studios’ Dead of Night. This choice may at first appear strange. Dead…
Photo Credit: Rich Grundy In 1792, a British army officer sent to assess the morale of potential troops in an imminent war against revolutionary France reported with horror that the workers of Sheffield did not only ‘read the most violent publications,’ they also ‘comment on them.’ In Halifax, a Methodist chapel had set up a debating society at which the town’s weavers…
I spent much of my childhood in the land of long and lonely driveways hung with fog and remote houses in the middle of storms; of darkened railway stations and cultists, standing stones and lurking creatures, sinister voiceovers and pale faced, long fingered children. This wasn’t through personal choice; I just grew up in a family that was intensely interested in ghost…
Meritocracy, technocracy and cosmopolitanism in the court of Henry VIII: an unlikely ‘patient zero’ of modern liberalism. Historical fiction can do two things for contemporary readers. It can exhibit the strangeness of the past, show how thought and action was driven by mindsets fundamentally different from our own, and act as a portal for the modern reader onto an alien world. Or…
