Philosophy depends on words to express ideas, arguments and value-laden judgements but a narrative story of philosophy’s development also lends itself to graphic representation.   Sean Sheehan   “Heretics!” uses a comic-book format to tell the story of seventeenth-century thinkers – mostly radical philosophers but also iconoclastic scientists –who challenged […]

Europeans tend to have only smidgens of information about Panama; to call it knowledge would be going too far.   Sean Sheehan   Arturo Soto’s photographs are not intended to impart new facts but offer a fresh perspective on somewhere that, not knowing any better, might be thought of as […]

Images of Africa have for too long been the result of cameras wielded by white photographers. A new book from the German publisher Steidl helps redress this imbalance.   Sean Sheehan   Once upon a colonial time, European and American photographers were drawn to a continent that exhibited a sensibility […]

This novel is set in the ungentrified, Italian-inflected neighbourhood of Brooklyn called Gravesend. It’s a rundown place where you might not choose to live if you had much choice in the matter.   Sean Sheehan   There is nothing glamorous or life-changing about it: bridges and tunnels lead to other […]