Month: September 2020
Wake up in Uruapan
By Felipe Elvira Imagine waking up in Uruapan. Many thousands of Uruapenses who have crossed the border over into the USA dream of doing just that. They make films about it. Uruapan, with its orchards and breathtakingly beautiful national park built along river banks. Uruapan’s park has hundreds of fountains all carved out of volcanic […]
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Cartoon Brexit Villains
By Rob Hyde On the face of it, given how my country-hopping life in Europe turned out, I should have been made an EU pin-up boy. Though a 43-year-old British national, I have spent half of my life on mainland Europe. Last year I also acquired German citizenship, which in turn makes me a citizen […]
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If You are such a Badass, Join a Trade Union
You can live a rich and full life – if you take collective action By Phil Hall When you look at the mountain of self-help books you should laugh. This is the correct response to most of them. Each one usually contains only one or two interesting ideas. Typically, these ideas are derivative and oversimplified […]
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Lance the Boil in the Collective Unconscious of the USA
More Glamorous than Che: Make a Film about the life of Angela Davis By Phil Hall It’s fascinating to see how films or books or musicians who really epitomised the zeitgeist and hit the spot sometimes plunge out of sight. What a good film My beautiful Launderette was. It exposed the homo-eroticism behind so much […]
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Wilderness years for the Labour Left, by Paul Halas
By Paul Halas With the Labour Party once more appeasing the “Establishment”, can it still be home to left wingers? Like many, I’m one of those who has found the past year thoroughly dispiriting. Leaving aside Covid, these have been dark days for the left. Keir Starmer’s virtual opening speech at the virtual Labour Party […]
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The Balloonist
By Phil Hall On the 22nd of April 1992. There were 10 petrol-gas explosions in northern Guadalajara, killing at least 242 people, injuring up to 600 and destroying 8 kilometres of city streets making 15,000 people homeless. But the southern-central part of the city, where the branch of the institute was located, was unaffected. The […]
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Travels in an Oxcart in South Africa at the Turn of the 19th Century
By Connie Hall Arthur Lewis Hall was a fellow of the Royal Society, a winner of the Murchison Medal and credited by the makers of Earth Story, a BBC documentary, with being one of the first geologists to guess the real age of the earth. Auntie Connie, his eldest, was the first female lawyer in South […]
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Superhero Status Anxiety
K, a superhero, finds working as an ESL teacher tough… By James Royce Mcguire It’s wacked. Here he is living the life of a superhero, not angry at anyone, simply living his life and there she is. A half-cat creature with a feline purr that would drive any superhero wild. “It really isn’t fair,” he […]
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Tony Hall’s Interview with Nelson Mandela in Hiding
It was 1961, I was a reporter on the main SA daily newspaper The Star. The African National Congress had been banned by the white Apartheid government, and its leaders house arrested and not allowed to meet or speak publicly. Nelson Mandela, a Johannesburg lawyer, and one of the top leadership, had gone underground, slipped out of the country. He […]
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Editorial, July 2020
In July we began the month with a powerful argument against Rebecca Long-Bailey’s dismissal by Richard House published by Paul Halas. It had a large number of other signatories. The article was widely read and then republished elsewhere. There is no question, but that it was read by key figures in the Labour Party who […]
Continue ReadingPoem of the Month: Benjamin Cusden on the homelessness
Benjamin Cusden is a poet who crossed over to the light from the darkness, and in the pamphlet, Cut The Black Rabbit, to be published on the date by Against The Grain Poetry Press. he presents the view from that darkness.
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Poet of Honour: Mimi Khalvati
Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran and has lived most of her life in London. She has published nine collections with Carcanet Press, including The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2007, and Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.
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