Byung-Chul Han is a Korean-born philosopher, based in Germany. Training initially as a metallurgist, he moved west and switched disciplines, becoming now one of our chief public intellectuals. Steve Latham   He has examined the impact of social and technological change on the psyche of contemporary culture, concentrating on how […]

I have a distinct childhood memory, of a scene from a film I saw, where a man is looking at a blue flower, which I remember as a blue rose.   Steve Latham   The image has stayed with me, throughout my life: a picture disconnected from anything else, anything […]

I love libraries. When I was little, my dad took me, each week, to the local library in our tiny northern industrial town. No doubt, actually quite small, the library seemed huge to me.   Steve Latham   While he perused the adult shelves, I borrowed books of classic boy’s […]

It is strange how the English word ‘estate’ has different meanings. It may mean the plush land-holdings of the aristocracy, or a social housing development, for the working class and poor.   Steve Latham   When I was growing up, our town had an ‘estate’, in this latter sense. As […]