The journey of three teenagers riding “the Beast”, the train that leads to the desired future in the United States, is full of risks and is destroying innocence, hope and grand dreams, metre by metre. Noelia Ceballos Terrén From his first steps behind a camera 30 years later […]
Culture
Learning ancient Greek
The presence of classics in working-class culture, challenging its more usual role in the education of the ruling class, is inspiringly documented in “A people’s history of Classics” (2020), by Edith Hall and Henry Stead. Sean Sheehan It had been evoked earlier, in the opening scene of Brian […]
Written out of history
The creation of a West and East Germany did not come about by design. Stalin wanted a buffer between the USSR and the West, not a separate, self-governing German state, and he looked to German communists who had fled to Russia during the 1930s and survived his purges. Sean […]
That fine line between good and dad art
The only explanation for a critic judging the work of an artist is that he thinks the artist seeks to be a critic-and no one tells them otherwise. “Those who know music create it, those who know less teach it, those who know less still organise it, and those who […]
Two kinds of treasure
At an obvious level, the distinction between fact and fiction is clear: a story can be about factual truths or imaginative ones. Sean Sheehan Robert Lewis Stevenson’s “Treasure island” is a fictional story so there is no point in trying to get rich by searching through the […]
















