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 […]

Throughout the world, far-right populists mobilise supporters along lines of identity: especially religion and race.   Steve Latham   Left-wing commentators decry this, because it subverts class-based politics. But (as a friend asked me) what is the relationship between these two models of political mobilisation? It is ironic that leftists […]

Every male on earth, from the earliest time, has carried a ‘Y’ chromosome (the X-shaped bundles of DNA, contained within the cell nucleus) inherited from the father, which makes him differ from the female, with two X chromosomes.   Nigel Pocock   In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote his classic statement […]

It happened in March 1957, after three in the afternoon. The Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista was drinking coffee in his office when several screams and gunfire shots shook the then Presidential Palace.   Isaura Diez Millan   50 young men under the command of Carlos Gutierrez Menoyo entered the headquarters […]