The opening paragraph of “Searching for memory: Aluízio Palmar and the shadow of dictatorship in Brazil” brings the startling news that in 2019 Aluízio Palmar was sued by the retired army officer who had once tortured him.   Sean Sheehan   Aluízio was an armed militant opposed to Brazil’s dictatorship […]

“The boys” is about a small number of characters who live around northwest London and who, on the face of it, are not unduly troubled by the fractures and complexities of their world.   Sean Sheehan   There is little sense of crisis or despair and the novel itself reads […]

“The brothers Karamazov” is extraordinary. Mini-narratives, encounters and conversations between the characters proliferate like vegetation in a botanist’s rainforest fantasy. They spawn new stories by way of background to another story which is itself an offshoot of what looks to be the main story.   Sean Sheehan   The reader […]

The historical origins of La Santa Muerte (Saint Death) in Mexico are obscure but the cult, now more popular than ever, has millions of followers. This strikes an unsettling chord with the country’s plague of murderous narco-related violence.   Sean Sheehan   Myriam Lamrani considers this confluence of the spiritual-poetic […]

If Herodotus is the ‘father of history’ then surely Strabo (c. 60 BC–c. AD 25), describing the physical past and present of his known world, deserves the same status for geography.   Sean Sheehan   Born more than half a millennium after Herodotus, Strabo documents three continents at a time […]