Before the street, people who were not family socialised in a village square, a town’s marketplace or, strictly for the elite, a court or castle.     Sean Sheehan   Streets as we know them came with industrialisation, becoming a vital public space and by the early 20th century street […]

The end of the Ottoman Empire, stretching from the Balkans to the Arabian peninsula, remains in the shade of other deceased empires   – ancient Rome’s epoch-defining downfall; Tsarism’s out-of-the-blue collapse; the gradual dismemberment of the British Empire – but this book corrects the imbalance.   Sean Sheehan   Written with understated […]

Perry Anderson is a high-powered analyst of historical and political currents and it would be amiss to go through life without reading him but while “Different speeds, same furies” is not typical of his concerns it is characteristic in its intellectual prowess, clinical dissection and coolness of tone.     […]

Henry Thoreau famously went to live alone in a small house he built for himself: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I […]