The Hong Kong actor Maggie Cheung remarked in an interview “The Chinese don’t accord much importance to things of the past, whether it’s films, heritage, or even clothes or furniture. In Asia nothing is preserved, turning towards the past is regarded as stupid, aberrant.” A sweeping statement but one that […]
Book reviews
Racism in photography
Visual representations of race are shot through with racist attitudes and “Decolonising the camera” examines this through a series of case studies. Sean Sheehan In 1945, Life magazine – a large-format (36cm by 26cm) and hugely influential publication – produced six pages of photographs showing the horrors that […]
Poignant pictures of a noble life
This book, “Letter to Bruno Manser”, is a memorial to Bruno Manser and it begins with a photograph of the mountain that marks his last known location, before he vanished in 2000, and a letter: “Dear Bruno, if only you knew how many of your friends looked for you at […]
The communist imperative
There are lessons to learn from the current pandemic and one of them – the need for radical thinking, authority and discipline – underlies Žižek’s recent articles in the public media. They have been substantially rewritten for “A left that dares to speak its name”. Sean Sheehan He […]
A book for bibliophiles
If you love Jane Austen and want to form your own club of like-minded devotees, Janine Barchas is someone who has to receive an invitation. In “The lost books of Jane Austen” – oh that there were! – she tracks the history of the novels’ publications over the course of […]