Singer celebrating Sayeda Zeinab Mulid , photo Tina Bexson by Tina Bexson He took the brown-wrapped parcel for the English wife he had left a year ago. Walked out of his hotel along the tree-lined streets of Zamalek, scattered with embassies and nineteenth-century apartment blocks exuding the Westernised ambience and nightlife…
a retirement home for gods
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Yogesh Patel: a retirement home for gods
From poet’s forthcoming collection, 2½: Theatre of the Absurd.
A Seduction
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“POETRY IS PRIMORDIAL” – AN INTERVIEW WITH A.F. MORITZ
A F. (Albert) Moritz ranks among the most important poets writing in English today. The author of 22 volumes of verse alongside his work as a translator and editor, he is the recipient of the Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the English-speaking world’s most celebrated poetry award. He has…
Peter Cowlam
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Peter Cowlam: 3 Poems
Peter Cowlam Cultivations Things over here are only intimations,flickers, non-lucent, light as obfuscation,detail vanishing in air. The gardens do not deserve the fate we havedesignated, emptied of the beings who madethem. They have gone. Their flora I cannot name,and no one is called back, not from the two-lanerutted tracks repeating…
Arun Kapil
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Cooking with Waters, Flowers & Perfume
Kannauj, India’s attar capital, still distills, photo Arun Kapil Throwing Open the Kitchen Windows by Arun Kapil The first time I served a dish in Ireland to paying guests, my hands shook. Ballymaloe House, cold starter section, summer. Myrtle Allen—matriarch, mentor, midwife to so many Irish food dreams—looked over her…
2/I Borisov
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Don’t Panic, 3I/ATLAS is Coming
The trajectory of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, photo NASA/JPL-Caltech “Piensas mal y atinaras.”— Old Mexican proverb By Phil Hall While films like Don’t Look Up! highlighted the danger of accidental asteroid impacts, a more disturbing possibility exists: intentional planetary bombardment. An interstellar object traveling at 60 km/s, if artificially directed, could serve as the…
Algeria
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Let Gaza Live: The Arab World Must Open Its Borders Now
Arab League Summit 2025, photo Government of Yemen, public domain Tactical Withdrawals Can Become Strategic Victories by Phil Hall The world watches the mutilated bodies of Palestinian children on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, weaponising their suffering for clicks and protests, yet none of these outraged demonstrators demand the one thing…
Cassiodorus
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Think Like a Venetian
Poseidon in the Lagoon, Phil Hall / Bing We need a Deliberate Act of Civilizational Triage by Phil Hall “We are glad to make special inquiry about you, whom the nature of your dwelling-place and the fertility of your soil commend. For you live like sea-birds, with your homes dispersed,…
BRICS
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BRICS: A New Planet Swims into View
Cyril Ramaphosa and BRICS representatives, Johannesburg, August 2023, photo, PM’s Office India Hope in Bleak Times: the Global Order is Changing for the Better by Phil Hall BRICS has declared sovereign equality a core principle. The bloc explicitly rejects the Western-dominated “rules-based order,” instead demanding urgent reforms to the United…
energy autonomy
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Will Europe Escape the USA’s Death Spiral?
Bundeskanzler Willy Brandt besichtigte am 1.3.1974 die Zeche “Minister Stein” in Dortmund-Eving Despite its Recent Pivot, Germany Was Always a Counterweight to American Adventurism by Phil Hall The American empire is bankrupt, deindustrialised, and addicted to war. Its “leadership” is a farce. The U.S. has caused more global instability than…
Alfred Rosenberg
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Divide and Collapse: From Bandera to BRICS in 80 Years
by Phil Hall The history of Ukrainian nationalism, in one of its earliest iterations (and most virulent forms) rose out of the civil war in the early 1920s when 22 armies invaded the Soviet Union in an attempt to overthrow the Soviet government. Britain was the main backer and enemy…
Gustavo Alatorre
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José Pulido
The International Colloquium of Poetry and Philosophy is the brainchild of the Mexican poet and writer Ulises Paniagua. Taking part in the fifth iteration of the colloquium, Jose Pulido, the renowned and universally revered Venezuelan poet read out several of his poems and was interviewed by the Mexican poet Gustavo Alatorre.
Alfred Hitchcock
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9. IMMOVABLE OBJECTS
Hitchcock & Selznick by Norman B. Schwartz The irresistible force paradox, a law of physics, states that when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force, each is indestructible. When that happens, as the law was later interpreted by Miss Doris Day – well, something’s got to give. Without doubt, the…
Karl Rutlidge
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Two New Malden Poets: Evensong & Psalm
photo Karl Rutlidge I’ve been working on a poem for a while to try and capture the grief I’ve felt following the Supreme Court ruling and its aftermath, and an experience of God I had while spending time in Regent’s Park, which is where this photo was taken. For context,…
Amal Chatterjee
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Seven times three
The Thinker by Rodin, photo Phil Hall by Amal Chatterjee In my childhood, art in its myriad forms involved perplexing encounters with the good, the worthy and, no doubt, the banal and ridiculous. I had no way of telling them apart, I possessed no judgement. I consumed – or rather,…
Arun Kapil
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Global Guts & Local Plates
Drying Roses, photo by Oziel Gómez Are You Crying Over Rose Petals? by Arun Kapil We live in the golden age of food fusion. From kimchi toasties to samosa tacos, the global pantry has never been more open. The streets of Cork, London, Birmingham and Dublin drip with imaginative remixes:…
Cecil Sharp
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Dancing on the Radio
Dancing the Morris, William Kemp 1600 By David Rees In the 1980s and ’90s I was a Morris dancer. Before I go any further, allow me to ward off any clichéd images that are no doubt flashing through your mind – understandably so. Those of starched white shirts, flapping hankies,…
Bereavement
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Ordinary Pain
Photo by Vijay Sadasivani, Pexels by Lucy Hall It had been over a year. That was what James was thinking as he wound his way through the plastic bollards. He ignored the street worker who was yelling at him, one hand on his head and the other outstretched, fingers spread…
Fiction
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The Mosque of Timna by Tina Bexson
photo Tina Bexson David Skinner positioned his rifle between two jagged edges of lilac quartz rock and concentrated on calculating the lines of fire on a point below him. He had rec-ed this exact spot each day for the last two weeks, studying the lay of the land, the position…
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
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The 12-Day War of Lies
US B2 bomber, Photo by Phyllis Lilienthal on Pexels.com Were both the US and Iranian attacks merely performative? by James Tweedie So it finally happened: Israel went to war with Iran and the US waded in to back it up. Friday the 13th 2025 was another unlucky day for peace…
Abingdon
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A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID MELLING
From Goldilocks and the Three Crocodiles, ©David Melling Interview by Paul Halas The choice of illustrated children’s books available is dazzling, almost bewilderingly so, but for every generation of kids and parents looking for something special there are a few illustrators and writers who stand out from the crowd. Whose…
Assisted Dying
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‘how do you like your blue eyed boy Mr Death’*
Wes Streeting, detail from his official portrait, photo Chris McAndrew There Are Not Enough Safeguards! by Phil Hall Any legislation of this kind must robustly safeguard against abuse, and guarantee that those who are seriously ill would not feel coerced or pressured to prematurely end their life. I am not…
Declassified
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The Power of Sousveillance
Fatima Hassouna photographer, murdered in Gaza by the Zionists. Photograph: Fatima Hassouna Alternative media and citizen journalists have ripped apart Israel’s legitimacy, and caused the USA’s foreign policy to be globally reviled by Phil Hall I remember going on a demonstration in 1977. We went to Brick Lane to stop the…
Barrow-in-Furness
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Barra Boy
by David Yip I was born in 1971 into a family with a Chinese father and English mother with two older sisters and one elder brother. My younger sister will be born three years later, completing our family of seven. My mum, one of nine, left her home town of…
Cary Grant
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8. MALE IMPERSONATORS
Cary Grant, RKO publicity still from Suspicion (1941) Public Domain “I used to go out with actresses and other female impersonators.“ ~Mort Sahl by Norman B. Schwartz Of all the occupations known to man, none has been more admired or reviled than acting. Once upon a time, society viewed acting as no…
Arun Kapil
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Fridge-Door Alchemy
Close-up of spicy anda bhurji (scrambled eggs) fresh from an Indian street vendor, photo Arun Kapil Cooking With Your Whole Soul Without So Much As a Dicky Bird by Arun Kapil The best meals don’t come from perfect conditions. They come from panic. From 6:42 p.m. fridge-staring, teeth on edge,…
Amal Chatterjee
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The Inspection
photo by Photo by Rene Terp by Amal Chatterjee The coffee, he thinks, ought to be warmer. On a scale, he prefers closer to hot than to body temperature. And a little more sugar, half a teaspoon more, that’d do the trick. ‘…it’s a privilege,’ the Headmaster is saying. He…
Jeffrey Masson
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Jeffrey Masson and The Assault on Truth
Appearing in 1989 on the British TV discussion programme After Dark, Wikimedia Commons Have we Misunderstood Freud? by Tina Bexson Freud challenged us to go beyond appearances and to consider that what a person consciously thought to be only a small insignificant part of their personality. He was then the first…
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