The Rio cinema in Hackney, at the Stoke Newington end of Kingsland High St, has been there for as long as anyone can remember.   Sean Sheehan   I recall as a youngster, when there were other cinemas on the same street (the Rio was then called the Classic), that […]

When Cyprian Ekwensi’s “People of the city” was first published in the 1950s, it was the second Nigerian novel to be published in Britain, predating Chinua Achebe’s hugely influential “Things fall apart”.   Sean Sheehan   Reading it now, republished nearly seventy years after it was written, serves to confirm […]

Guy Debord’s “Society of the spectacle” was first published in France in 1968 and it remains closely associated with the country’s events of that incendiary year.   Sean Sheehan   This fails to do justice to its sober analysis of society and, with a new edition just published, it is […]

“Daughters of Africa” is an anthology of writing by women of African descent that appeared in 1992, edited by Margaret Busby. This was a time when the number of black women writers known to the literati could be counted on the fingers of one hand – so the more than […]