This is the UK’s longest running annual festival and will light up the city with music concerts, theatrical performances, literature and visual arts in a variety of venues. And it will take place between Thursday 6 July and Sunday 16 July. It was founded in 1998 to keep alive […]
Culture
Just do it
James Kelman horrified the literary establishment when he won a major award for his fourth novel, “How late it was, how late” in 1994. Sean Sheehan A novel about an ex-con losing his sight as the result of a beating by the police and then coming up against […]
The other Germany
Spy movies evoke East Berlin as a sinister place from where people try to escape, a dystopian enclave with a dreaded security service, the Stasi. Sean Sheehan What tends to get forgotten is the German Democratic Republic (the GDR) the country born in 1949 and where close to […]
Anti-system art: organising outside the State
Impact strategies (visual, auditory…) as a form of struggle for some social movements today are not always effective against the system that they are critical of. The danger of these methods is that the epidermal impacts are merely substitutes for profound changes. It is what the popular wisdom would describe […]
The horrible marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
Knowing what is going on between two people who are living together is fraught with difficulties per se and when the couple happen to be Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, a relationship that ended with her suicide, the problem of secure knowledge reaches an impasse. Sean Sheehan We […]