Tag Archive | history
Queueing for Beginners: ‘the tiny catastrophes of which everyday existence is made up’
In 1973, Georges Perec wrote, ‘What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front page splash, the banner headlines…The daily papers talk of everything except the daily …We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.’ Joe Moran’s book Queueing for Beginners, which I’ve just read, aims to […]
Jomon pottery: potter and clay endure
As far as exhibitions go, sometimes small can be beautiful. Last week at the British Museum to see the Shakespeare: Staging the World exhibition, I happened to wander into a side room where an exhibition consisting of just three objects was on display. Flame and water pots: prehistoric ceramic art from Japan is a concise, […]
Vikings on the Wirral
Recently I went along to an exhibition at the Liverpool Nordic Centre of paintings by three local artists, exhibiting together as part of the Independent Biennial under the title Sea Scapes – Land Shapes. What drew me particularly was that one of the artists whose work was on display was a former work colleague, local writer […]
These books are made for walking: step one
Paths have always fascinated me. Sometimes their imprint of human purpose on the landscape can be a mystery: why does this path exist? Who made it, and when? Often paths lift the spirit with their sense of wilfulness – tracks left by those determined to make their way according to no rules. I’ve walked for […]
On Offa’s Dyke: ‘the landscape flowed away, back to its source’
The weather map in the morning paper said it all: one oval isobar, a lazy ridge of high pressure lapping at the shores of the British Isles. Nothing like it for the whole of this damp, drab summer. Early on, with the dog in the dog in the park, there had been frost, now the […]
The Love of Books: A Sarajevo Story
The siege of Sarejevo began on 5 April 1992 and lasted for nearly four years, until 29 February 1996. In that time nearly 12,000 civilians were killed or went missing in the city, including over 1,500 children. An additional 56,000 people were wounded, including nearly 15,000 children. The siege, by Bosnian Serb forces of the Republika Srpska, […]
For these times: the portrait of Ayuba Sueiman Diallo
‘You can now say things about Muslims, in polite society and even among card-carrying liberal lefties, that you cannot say about any other group or minority.’Those were the words of Mehdi Hasan, writing a final comment piece for The Guardian on Tuesday. They came to mind as I stood before the remarkable portrait of an […]
Patti Smith’s Banga: new lands to be explored
Reviewing Patti Smith’s new album, Banga, for Pitchfork, Lindsay Zoladz writes: Remember those words that shot out of her lips like hot lightning on her brilliant 1978 record Easter: “I don’t fuck much with the past, but I fuck plenty with the future.” Well, more than three decades later, Banga is the work of someone interested in fucking […]
‘Prints’: 6000 year-old footprints in the sand
The prehistoric human footprints of Formby beach have always fascinated me (I wrote about them here a couple of years ago). So last week’s Poem of the Week on the Guardian website caught my attention. ‘Prints’ by Helen Tookey takes as its theme the prehistoric human footprints that have been discovered, baked into the mud-layers beneath […]
Neal Ascherson on the idea of Europe: past and possible future
Recently, Neal Ascherson spoke about Europe and its history in a lecture for the London Review of Books at the British Museum. The full text is published in the current issue of the London Review of Books, and is also available, as text or podcast, on the LRB website. Ascherson called his lecture ‘Memories of […]
