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 […]

Relationships and feelings are untidy, friends and family are those you only think you know, the libidinal is a minefield, mistakes and misinterpretations are made, regrets are buried and then – out of the blue, the unconscious or the cunning of reason – something returns, resurrected,  unwanted; the truth can […]

Nostalgia is one of those words that have slipped away from their moorings, tending now to being used loosely for wistful, dewy-eyed sentimentality whereas its ancient Greek origins suggest a more serious state of mind.   Text: Sean Sheehan Photos: Steve Pyke   From the Greek nostos (return home) and […]