Culture

Book reviews Comments Culture In Focus

Street life

Before the street, people who were not family socialised in a village square, a town’s marketplace or, strictly for the elite, a court or castle.     Sean Sheehan   Streets as we know them came with industrialisation, becoming a vital public space and by the early 20th century street […]

Book reviews Comments Culture In Focus

The cost of Empire

The end of the Ottoman Empire, stretching from the Balkans to the Arabian peninsula, remains in the shade of other deceased empires   – ancient Rome’s epoch-defining downfall; Tsarism’s out-of-the-blue collapse; the gradual dismemberment of the British Empire – but this book corrects the imbalance.   Sean Sheehan   Written with understated […]

Book reviews Comments Culture In Focus

Good reactionary art

Perry Anderson is a high-powered analyst of historical and political currents and it would be amiss to go through life without reading him but while “Different speeds, same furies” is not typical of his concerns it is characteristic in its intellectual prowess, clinical dissection and coolness of tone.     […]