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 […]

The translator of the first edition in English of Anna Gréki’s “Algérie, capitale, Alger” quotes some lines from a poem where Gréki speaks of wanting to “reveal a certain movement / a certain rhythm, certain relations / of people to a situation”.   Sean Sheehan   Born in Algeria, her […]

Summer is the best time for identifying the trees and flowers making their presence felt around you and there are two new and outstanding guides to help make the task easier. When despair threatens to engulf the spirit, the beauty and value of the natural world becomes more precious than […]

In “The Castle”, Richard Mosse deploys hi-tech thermographic cameras of the kind associated with stealth surveillance by the military. He uses the technology to record moments of life in refugee camps and border crossings along the migration routes into Europe from neighbouring continents.   Sean Sheehan   The site for […]

The first insurrection against the British Empire in the twentieth century, the Easter Rising, took place in Ireland in 1916 – when the Empire controlled nearly a quarter of the world’s population.   Sean Sheehan   Nationalist and anticolonial resistance spread widely in the aftermath of World War I, especially […]