Category: Tony Hall

The USA broke Afghanistan, now it must own the mess.

Ars Notoria, 17th October 2025

The USA Bugs Out By Phil Hall and Tony Hall The decisive battle that the USA has lost is the battle to rebuild Afghanistan and win hearts and minds. Let’s start by injecting a little historical memory into these farcically simplistic and convenient narratives of invasion, counter invasion and withdrawal….

Between belief and reality: a personal reflection on Tony Hall’s 2020 Vision for Southern Africa

Ars Notoria, 17th October 2025

Dale T McKinley (For ARS NOTORIA) A prefacing note: On 31st January it will have been exactly 13 years since Tony Hall passed away here in South Africa. A bit over a year before his passing, Tony penned a 14-page document that he titled, ‘2020 Vision for Southern Africa’ ….

Tony Hall’s Interview with Nelson Mandela in Hiding

Ars Notoria, 17th October 2025

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…

Tony Hall’s Interview with Yves Montand

Ars Notoria, 17th October 2025

Yves Montand in Nairobi in 1966 By Tony Hall On the face of it it may seem strange for a film star to speak so much on politics. But for Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret, one of the really distinguished couples in the world of serious entertainment, taking…

CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION

Ars Notoria, 6th May 20253rd April 2026

‘Blowing bubbles distracts these children from the war poster behind them.’ Front page of the Tanzania Standard, June 1971. Dar-es-Salaam 1971-72 by Phil Hall At twelve, I was bespectacled and precocious and political, living with my family in Upanga, Dar-es-Salaam. A towering kungu tree stood outside our house. It was…

‘It’s delightful! Very, very funny … Anyone with a true sense of him should find it wholly engaging!’

Stephen Fry

What would Oscar Wilde make of modern day Britain? And what would modern day Britain make of a latter day Oscar Wilde?

In this beautifully illustrated graphic novel, Dan Pearce brings the celebrated and notorious Victorian wit a century into the future, with great humour and a Wildean sense of mischief in his own right.

“J. W. Wood’s stories evince a gift for the quotidian, employing brilliant conceits and mischievous turns of phrase which enrich the writing at every point. Capturing the frustration of curtailed lives and the grim horrors of the corporate world, Wood presents a meta-fictional universe in which the rich realise their folly and we control computers, not the other way round.”

—Julian Stannard, award-winning poet and author of The University of Bliss (Sagging Meniscus Press, USA, 2024)

That Was Hugo Blythe MP is the professional journal, presented in diary form, of government researcher Alaric Casteele. Casteele’s diary is a skilful interchange between events in his domestic life, and his meticulous eavesdropping into the political intrigues levelled against his boss Hugo Blythe, a government minister pivotal in the New Labour project, climaxing as a general election approaches.

Delightful, informative and sceptical – but never cynical – The Rights of Man And Fish nods to Voltaire, Günter Grass and Paul Torday’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, while maintaining a humour and breadth of vision entirely its own. Join Gisella as she finds out what makes the ideal society based on what she learns from a millennium of human error, intrigue and haute cuisine. Wittily illustrated by Pete Field, this work is a tour de force.

Congratulations to one of our regular contributors, Andy Hall, for winning the prestigious Trieste Photo Days award for best author. The competitions was judged by the renowned photographer Harry Gruyaert, who said:

'I chose this work because it's the kind of work I would have liked to have taken myself. His compositions stand out; he's pulling order from chaos and some of these images are truly powerful.'

Prospero in his cell busy indwelling, might have time to ponder the mystery of the myth that is Bob Dylan. He is concealed behind a dark blue velvet curtain embroidered in gold; Dylan with a megaphone standing on a stool, blown up from Minnesota.

Phil Hall

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© AN Editions 2025. All rights reserved. Materials on this website are free to download for personal use but must not be publicly disseminated, re-published or broadcast without permission. To seek permission, please use the Contact page of this website, or contact the author, artist, or photographer directly. No representation, warranty or covenant, whether express or implied, is made as to the accuracy of any information or statements contained in the Ars Notoria Magazine and AN Editions shall have no liability of any nature whatsoever for any inaccuracies.