Humane socialism
Bring the powerful to heel, don’t glorify monarchs and privilege by Philip Hall The idea that Charles III is divinely appointed to rule over us is ridiculously far-fetched. Yet, ultimately, it is the metaphysical idea of the divine right of kings that gives King Charles III his political legitimacy. According to this theory, ordinary British […]
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Reviewed by Inderjeet Mani Latin America can lay claim to some of the world’s most magnificent geographies and vital ecosystems, teeming with unique life-forms and vibrant subcultures. The area has also borne witness to vast empires and savage colonial histories, and fired the imaginations of many gifted writers and artists. In The Alphabets of Latin […]
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Episode 7 The Quixotesque misadventures of unreconstructed Marcher Morgan Jones-Jones, who has probably not heard of the suffragettes let alone second- and third-wave feminists. That’s the thing about people from the Welsh Marches, we All-Wise Three have observed, they’re neither one thing nor the other – and sometimes they’re both. Offa’s Dyke was supposed to […]
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By Pat Rowe Bryan Greetham (1946-2022) the writer and thinker, died on Sunday 26th June in Estepona, Spain. Above all, Bryan wanted to help students of all ages be the best thinkers possible. Bryan was born in Faversham, Kent. He failed the 11 plus exam and went to a secondary modern school. But this didn’t […]
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by Peter Cowlam A marine organism in unfathomable ocean depths receives light from a star a light year away, and responds, with a tiny twitch, the merest throb. By definition, the light the organism is influenced by has taken a year to reach it, as a staggered simultaneity, asking us to reconcile an apparent contradiction. […]
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By Bryan Greetham. We are busy producing a generation of the most sophisticated recyclers of received opinion In Robert Pirsig’s best-selling book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he describes ‘the old South Indian Monkey Trap’, which consists of a coconut, which has been hollowed out and chained to a stake. Inside there is […]
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Nothing Stays Put The strange and wonderful are too much with us. The protea of the antipodes – a great, globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom – for sale in the supermarket! We are in our decadence, we are not entitled. What have we done to deserve all the produce of the tropics – this […]
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London, 1983 O I had a future. Patrick Kavanagh Once there was a bedsit the size of a coffin. Once there was a man pounding out on his typewriter short stories that never made the classic Irish canon. The inmates twist and turn on their celibate beds. Each avoids the other, scuttling up and down […]
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Episode 6 The Quixotesque misadventures of unreconstructed Marcher Morgan Jones-Jones, who has probably not heard of the suffragettes let alone second- and third-wave feminists. What happened now Mam was gone? Without that huge and slippery post over which he had for so long vainly tried to throw his tiny mooring rope he was adrift in […]
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We are pleased to publish three poems from Dominic Fisher’s latest collection of poems, A Customised Selection of Fireworks, available from Shoestring Press later this month (May 2022). A Customised Selection of Fireworks It’s the sequence that really matters colour rhythm flow which isn’t something the lay person gets right every time. Maybe start with […]
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WE MUST STOP THEM by Phil Hall Gato, the new Google Artificial Intelligence system (tremble in your social media, free speech boots) is a perfect illustration of the point that the hyper-rich are beginning to use AI as their intermediary and control system. At the same time, the owners and purveyors of Artificial Intelligence try […]
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review by Peter Cowlam Kitaab International is a Singapore-based publishing house, whose open call through various media outlets across the world, when the anthology was planned, resulted in 1,500 pages of poetry sent in by almost 500 poets. As commissioning editor, Sudeep Sen invited further writers from across ‘AustralAsia’ to send their work to him […]
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Stop the War! ‘Do you know what I do to people who get in the way of me?’ asked the thuggish manager of a Gazoprom plant sitting across the table from me. ‘No, what do you do to them?’ ‘I destroy them.’ He said. And he stared at me, unsmiling. We must understand one thing […]
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SUDEEP SEN 1. RABINDRANATH TAGOREhaiku triptych ERASURE lines of poems scratched out, erased to ink in — new shapes — art revealed SELF-PORTRAIT gouache shade’s matt-blur — an outline of the psyche — subtle peek into soul’s eye SONG rabindra sangeet’s nasal baritone — honey- tinged, monotonic — Sudeep Sen My emotional and aural response […]
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WPP [World Poetry/Prose Portfolio] New Series | No. 1 ALFREDO PÉREZ ALENCART, born in Puerto Maldonado, Perú in 1962 is a Peruvian-Spanish poet and teacher at the University of Salamanca. He has published 15 books, among them, Mother Forest (2002), Hear me, my Brethren (2009), Cartography of the Revelations (2011), Paradise Mud (2019), The Sun […]
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By Paul Halas The democratisation of the image Art is everywhere, whether it’s highbrow gallery art, pulp, throwaway art, or the vast array of moving images available to us. Perhaps because my parents excelled in the production of animated films – possessing talents I sadly didn’t inherit – I was always fascinated by the incredible […]
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Review by Jon Elsby Some years ago, a slim, paperback volume entitled The Holiness of G. K. Chesterton appeared. It was a collection of essays by various Roman Catholic academics who shared the (still somewhat eccentric) view that Chesterton should be canonized. Now, we have a book by Richard Ingrams – best known as the […]
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Not-God is simply not enough. By Philip Hall The alternative to God is not Not-God. Rather it is something INSTEAD of God. But then what in heaven’s name would that be? Applying Ockham’s razor must not produce an absurdity. You cannot dispense with the notion of God without producing an absurdity (Try not to stumble […]
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Mathematics, Substance, Consciousness by Martin Clewett There are hundreds of theoretical physicists thinking about how to properly construct a mathematical description of the universe consistent with all the measurements we have so far made of it. Properly means the mathematical description must produce new predictions that can be checked. There are two accepted mathematical descriptions. […]
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“tell us brother, what colour was Jesus?” by Andy Hall In the Remote Venda area of Northern South Africa local champions from the village of Gabo meet their counterparts from the neighbouring village of Chifudzi on the other side of a river, to partake in an annual bareknuckle boxing tournament known as the “Musengwa“. It […]
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You need to become more self-reliant. by Tasneem Sheikh Wake up! Wake up! I hear my aunt wake my sisters, cousins and me early in the morning. We were teenage girls on a vacation, staying at a distant relative’s house. The host thought it was a great time to throw a huge lunch party for […]
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