The Situationist International (SI) was founded in 1957 and disbanded in 1972 but its ideas sparkle with relevance and a new book from Pluto Press makes this abundantly clear.   Sean Sheehan   The nine chapters of the book’s first part, Key Contexts, does what it says on the tin, […]

Writing about Kafka, Walter Benjamin explains how the word ‘unfolding’ has two meanings: a bud unfolds into a blossom while a paper boat unfolds into a flat sheet of paper.   Sean Sheehan   Two years later, writing “The storyteller”, he says how storytelling, rooted in oral tradition, allows the […]

The Rio cinema in Hackney, at the Stoke Newington end of Kingsland High St, has been there for as long as anyone can remember.   Sean Sheehan   I recall as a youngster, when there were other cinemas on the same street (the Rio was then called the Classic), that […]

When Cyprian Ekwensi’s “People of the city” was first published in the 1950s, it was the second Nigerian novel to be published in Britain, predating Chinua Achebe’s hugely influential “Things fall apart”.   Sean Sheehan   Reading it now, republished nearly seventy years after it was written, serves to confirm […]