A brief encounter with a Penan is burned into my memory. I was following a pathway, a mere stroll before darkness fell in the Kelabit Highlands in Sarawak where I was on a two-day trek.   Sean  Sheehan   He stepped out of the trees on one side, about to […]

The exhibition currently on show at the British Museum is called Troy: Myth and Reality but some plurals could have been used. Multiple myths and realities, some of an urgently contemporary kind, have created more than one Troy.   Sean Sheehan   An ancient city close to the northwest coast […]

Herodotus tells a story in “Histories” (5.49-54) about Aristagoras, the leader of a rebellion against the mighty Persian Empire, visiting Sparta to solicit military support. His sales pitch comes complete with a visual aid, a world map engraved on a bronze plate.   Sean Sheehan   Aristagoras uses the map […]

Roy Orbison, in unmatched songs like “A love so beautiful”, evokes the poignancy of a partnership remembered but it takes the letters between two young Germans, written between late 1944 and early 1945, to ground the piercing tenderness in an all-too-real relationship.   Sean Sheehan   When the Nazis gained […]