It is 1955 and Brigitte Reimann, who has wanted to be a writer since the age of 14, is now 22. She lives in the eastern half of a country divided by post-WW2 geopolitics into opposing parts, one effectively controlled by the US (West Germany) and the other by Russia […]

Words like provocative, unruly, radical easily come to mind but seem inadequate when discussing Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the hyper-prolific filmmaker whose untimely death in 1982 signalled the end of a politically tumultuous period in German history.   Sean Sheehan   To be more exact, the history of the western half […]

It is common to think of taxonomy, the branch of science concerned with classification, in terms of hierarchy:  divisions between Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species (made easier to remember with the mnemonic Kieran, Please come over for gay sex) are seen to define the natural order in much […]

Buchi Emecheta, orphaned as a child, came to London from Nigeria in the 1960s. When her marriage broke down she was only 22 and with five young children to bring up as a single mother. She died in 2017.   Sean Sheehan     The difficulties she faced in London are […]

Nudism was never part of her lifestyle but Virginia Woolf liked to remind friends she was inviting to her house to “bring no clothes”.   Sean Sheehan   What she meant by ‘clothes’ was traditional fashion which in the 1920s dictated how upper class women and men should dress, a […]