The beginning is Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus logico-philosophicus”, in 1922, and the end comes with his final notes, written between 1949 and 27 April, 1951, two days before his death. Sean Sheehan These last notes were brought together in book form and given the title “On Certainty”. New translations of […]
Book reviews
Before the Nakba
When Israel was created in 1948, Zionists set about ethnic cleansing by expelling Palestinians – the Nakba (‘catastrophe’) – an endeavour on the part of Israel being currently replayed in Gaza and the West Bank. Sean Sheehan “The Lord”, a rare fictional account of life in Palestine before […]
Treasuring trees
There is a type of conifer, the Trojan horse fir, growing on a mountain in the part of western Turkey that meets the Aegean Sea. Sean Sheehan It grows above the plain where the city of Troy stood until, as Homer recounts in the “Iliad”, it was finally […]
Stephen Shames: ways of seeing
Everyone will have seen the image of a defiant Trump, his ear and cheek blood-spattered, being rushed off stage by Secret Service agents at an open-air campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Sean Sheehan At the time of the attempted assassination, July 2024, Trump was a former president of the […]
Alone but not lonely
Rejections beset the British novelist Barbara Pym but reading two of her later novels confirms a talent that was not appreciated at the time. Sean Sheehan Pym wrote six novels in the 1950s and early ‘60s until her publisher unexpectedly rejected her seventh and she consequentially disappeared from […]















