On first acquaintance, Jacques Lacan is still capable of producing an aura of enigma and obscurity and in the past this invited ridicule. In 1989, Noam Chomsky was dismissing Lacan as a charlatan producing nonsense for the sake of it but now he has taken his place alongside Freud, the […]

Not modern any more, the London buildings that Ian Na irn wrote about in the early `1960s have been eclipsed by The Shard and 22 Bishopsgate and wonkily-shaped edifices christened with names like Gherkin, Walkie Talkie and Cheesegrater.   Sean Sheehan   Nairn would have liked the nicknames more than […]

Jonathan Meades was once a familiar face on television, especially on the BBC, in documentaries about architecture and the built environments of Britain.   Sean Sheehan   He has long been a journalist and a writer of fiction so the publication of “Empty wigs”, a collection of short stories, should […]

Slavoj Žižek makes the point, in his introduction to Michael Marder’s “Pyropolitics”, that always pointing to and blaming capitalism for the multifaceted antagonisms and urgencies besetting our world has the drawback of simplistically making the economy the sole culprit.   Sean Sheehan   The complexities calling for our attention are […]

In his introduction to his new translation of Chekov’s “Three sisters” Rory Mullarkey rightly draws a comparison between the early 20th century Russian play and Samuel Beckett’s mid-century “Waiting for Godot”: “Two masterpieces sit, like bookends of Modernism, with a half-century of horror between them”.   Sean Sheehan    And, […]