“Amazônia, sua linda” (Amazonia, you beauty) said Dom Phillips in his last social-media post at the end of May 2022. He and a fellow activist Bruno Pereira, on their way to the Javari Valley in northwest Brazil, were murdered six days later.   Sean Sheehan   Dom Phillips was researching […]

What it means to have a home has been central to drama, poetry and the novel for millennia. It is explored with insight by Tom McCarthy in a scintillating piece of literary analysis called “The threshold and the ledger”.   Sean Sheehan   The home/house as both a place of […]

Over thirty years ago, projecting slides onto plastic screens and mirrors, Claudia Andujar raised awareness of the sufferings of the Yanomami people brought about by illegal gold miners.   Sean Sheehan   The Yanomami live in an Amazonian region of northern Brazil and the forest of the Orinoco River basin […]

Victor Serge was born in Brussels in 1890 but came to live in many cities. He was, as an outstanding new biography puts it, an “unruly revolutionary”.   Sean Sheehan   His parents were Russian immigrants and, in Paris, their son was drawn into anarchist circles and began writing for […]

History books used to be boring, “one damn fact after another” as someone said, but not “Mexico: A history”.   Sean Sheehan   Written with verve, it will surprise anyone not familiar with the story of the country that had the first black and, later, the first indigenous president in […]