The rainbow colours and bold graphics of publications for young children throw into low relief the grey print of grown-ups’ books. Sean Sheehan Young minds love tales of soaring imagination and worlds of magical transformations where animals converse and the laws of physics are blissfully ignored. But heroism […]
Culture
Stories that get under the skin
“Tomorrow they won’t dare to murder us”, by Joseph Andras, confronts one of modern France’s two unpardonable crimes. Sean Sheehan The first was the collaborationist Vichy government that didn’t just come to terms with Nazi power – regretfully, under duress, so the story went – but willingly rounded […]
The mind of a conservative
George Berkeley is best known today as the eighteenth-century thinker who wrote “A treatise concerning the principles of human knowledge”. Sean Sheehan He argued that material reality only exists as mental states in the mind. What we think of as reality – the stuff of the world, like […]
The migrant caravan through Central America
The caravans of migrants from Central America are massive acts of resistance. Cinema becomes activism showing people on the journey, their own power as protagonists. The story of one woman and her children highlights poverty, an escape from domestic violence and anti-LGBTQ prejudice.
Cooking with Jane Austen
As all Jane Austen groupies will tell you, the people that inhabit her small but perfectly formed body of work are as real and immediate to us they were to Austen’s contemporaries. Sean Sheehan We all know a Mr Collins and it is a truth universally acknowledged that […]
















