It is common to think of taxonomy, the branch of science concerned with classification, in terms of hierarchy:  divisions between Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species (made easier to remember with the mnemonic Kieran, Please come over for gay sex) are seen to define the natural order in much […]

Buchi Emecheta, orphaned as a child, came to London from Nigeria in the 1960s. When her marriage broke down she was only 22 and with five young children to bring up as a single mother. She died in 2017.   Sean Sheehan     The difficulties she faced in London are […]

Nudism was never part of her lifestyle but Virginia Woolf liked to remind friends she was inviting to her house to “bring no clothes”.   Sean Sheehan   What she meant by ‘clothes’ was traditional fashion which in the 1920s dictated how upper class women and men should dress, a […]

“The recognitions” by William Gaddis has been around since 1955 but – not helped by being almost a thousand pages long – it remains a novel that is mostly unread.   Sean Sheehan   Like “Ulysses”, part of the reason it has acquired a reputation for being difficult is that […]

Violence was all around Walter Benjamin when he set down to write “Toward the critique of violence” in December 1920.   Sean Sheehan   The First World War had only been over for two years, the German Revolution had been ruthlessly suppressed in 1919 and nine months earlier a right-wing […]