Some temporal periods of history become so characterised by their new cultural forms that it identifies them per se. Sean Sheehan In this way, the Renaissance serves as a label for two centuries of western European artistic and scientific development; modernism comes to define what radically changed in […]
Book reviews
Rebuilding memory to find the truth
This is a collective and anonymous testimony of former political prisoners detained in Coronda, Santa Fe, one of the maximum-security prisons in Argentina during the last civil-military dictatorship (1976-1983). Sergio Ferrari It was first published in 2003 under the title “Del otro lado de la mirilla” (“On the […]
Guerilla days
As a young child sitting close to the front of a bus with my grandfather in West Cork I was quietly informed that the elderly person who had just boarded was Tom Barry. Sean Sheehan He looked like another ordinary old man to me and his name did […]
Last times
Victor Serge’s life was hugely eventful and his critical mind, without being bound by a priori opinions of a narrow kind, took note of what was happening around him. Sean Sheehan He was drawn to anarchist thought and but when the October Revolution occurred in 1917 he understood […]
Going concerns
Reading “The bloater”, a novel of less than 150 pages, is like sipping a glass of sparkling champagne after been deprived of the drink’s recuperative quality for too long. Sean Sheehan Its air of easy frivolousness feels life-enhancing, as does the wickedly delicious prose of Rosemary Tonks in […]