Riley’s Crisp lorry. Credit Arun Kapil All Tastes Are Equal – the Rest Is Theatre By Arun Kapil Back then – long before “scent” – smell was social currency. Curry smell meant immigrant. Chip-fat smell meant working class. Roast beef meant you’d arrived. In the seventies, Britain could be sniffed…
Alex Gordon
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MEETING ALEX GORDON
Alex Gordon giving a class. Copyright Karl Weiss, courtesy Marx Memorial Library ‘Financialisation and militarisation sustain this broken model. We need to advocate for peace and redistribution.’ An interview with Paul Halas and Phil Hall, editors at Ars Notoria Magazine Alex Gordon is a British trade unionist, a leading member…
Chartists
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The Marx Memorial Library: A Precious Universal Resource
A banner featuring Karl Marx, with the Marx Memorial Library building behind him. Photograph Paul Halas An Archive of Ideas to Change the World by Paul Halas Housed in an elegant eighteenth century building in Clerkenwell, the Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School contains a comprehensive collection of books, pamphlets,…
China
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Editorial: Rumours of the Death of Europe have been Greatly Exaggerated
Harold Wilson was willing to defy the U.S. and refused to take us to war in Vietnam. Photograph by Allen Warren, Creative Commons License From an anti-hegemonic, class-conscious perspective in favour of UK sovereignty and European wide solidarity and cooperation, we should have concluded that Europe’s problems are more political…
AI
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DUMAH
Screenshot from Yogesh Patel’s new poetry film, Dumah The Demands of the Art of Making a Poetry Film Using AI by Yogesh Patel “Thunderbirds are go,” I command myself when the creative current hits. It’s an almost primeval surge—the familiar, heady rush of a launch sequence. Just like the nostalgic…
Politics
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BOOK LAUNCH, AUTUMN 2025
AN EDITIONS and CentreHouse Press… …are launching new titles and paperbacks. The launch will take place on 12th November, 5.30 PM in the Library of the Society of Friends at The Quaker Centre, 173-177 Euston Road, London AN Editions is the publishing arm of the Humane Socialist magazine, Ars Notoria. Launched in March this year, we’re proud to carry on…
3I/ATLAS
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3I ATLAS: Along Comes a Black Swan
Cited from A. Loeb: 3I/ATLAS from the Two-meter Twin Telescope in the Canary Islands, August 2, 2025. It shows a faint jet pointed towards the Sun, extending out to a projected distance of about 6,000 kilometers from the nucleus, The direction away from the Sun (where a generic cometary tail…
Celibacy
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The Gnostic Blueprint
Detail from Gustave Moreau, The Apparition (1876) From Desert Scrolls to Modern Cults by Phil Hall Religions often begin with a core, a simple idea that becomes complicated as it unfolds through history. The art historian Kenneth Clark once observed that Islam was the simplest of the great religions invented…
BBC
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The Terminal Decline of Radio 3, by Jon Elsby
In the far off days when I was a boy, the Third Programme (as Radio 3 was then called) formed a vital part of my cultural education – primarily in music, but also in literature. I remember hearing actors of the calibre of Ralph Richardson, Trevor Howard, David Buck, Sybil…
Art
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MEETING BING SHI
Portrait of Bing Shi by Andy Hall by Paul Halas For all its many faults social media sometimes provides us with gems, and the paintings of artist Bing Shi have for us been one of the highlights on Facebook this year. Working in oils, with bold, sweeping brushstrokes that fail…
Culture
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Books, by Harry Greenberg
I think I met him first on a 24 bus coming through the West End. ‘Look, look,’ he said, ‘all those marvellous bookshops, doesn’t it make your heart glad?’ I nodded and made a long erm sound. But the truth was I couldn’t care a toss about books. I’d just…
Animation
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Line Boil: Don Hertzfeldt, The Gift That Just Keeps Giving, by Kathryn A. Kopple
With latex-covered fingers tugging hard at my tired mouth, the dentist informed me I had chipped a front tooth. Strange. I hadn’t noticed. So much had happened. COVID happened. We went into lockdown. My mother passed away. My marriage was frayed – and there were my children. My eldest child…
Capitalism
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Visions and Nightmares: The Visionaries by Wolfram Eilenberger
Reviewed by Jon Elsby The Visionaries bears the subtitle “Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Salvation of Philosophy”, which suggests a possible kinship with other recent publications – for example, Metaphysical Animals by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Benjamin Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up To Something, and Nikhil Krishnan’s…
OSCAR: THE SECOND COMING
The cover of Oscar: The Second Coming by Dan Pearce Dan Pearce’s Tale of Oscar Wilde Transported to the 21st century by Paul Halas 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…
King Charles III
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CIIIR
by Peter Cowlam CIIIR A reining in at the eco-centre. Dials in reverse for the lost trials of inspection. Ends but a stunted survey, fixated on crowds and venues. They are here, young obsessives of ‘belonging’, cropped in line, and blessed by the shades of the dead, each with plans…
Capitalism
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THE RIGHT TO PROPERTY IS NOT INALIENABLE
Enforcement of the duties of property ownership is the cornerstone of a good society by Phil Hall Rather than imagining they are powerful citizens, the ultra-rich prefer to believe that they are naturally unconstrained and owe little to individual states. They fantasise they roam the world like Captain Nemo, and…
Andrew Elsby
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Perspectives on Eichmann: Explaining Perpetrator Behaviour, by Andrew Elsby
Review by Arjay Frank Otto Adolf Eichmann (1906–62) has been the subject of a surprising number of studies, given that he was merely a middle-ranking officer in the Schutzstaffel (SS) – a lieutenant-colonel, in fact – and, as such, was responsible for carrying out the orders of others, and would…
Abhay K.
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The Alphabets of Latin America: A Carnival of Poems, by Abhay K
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….
Harry Greenberg
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Nothing Stays Put, by Harry Greenberg
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…
Dan Pearce
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Depression # 32 by Dan Pearce
Dan Pearce has done editorial work for many magazines and newspapers including New Society, Honey, 19, Oz, The Observer, The Times and Sunday Times, Mayfair and Penthouse. Dan has created book and record covers, political cartoons, comic strips and caricatures and he has written two graphic novels: ‘Critical Mess’ (against the nuclear industry)…
Alfredo Perez Alencart
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ALFREDO PÉREZ ALENCART
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),…
Abbey Road Studios
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Jackie Marua, the Abbey Road Studios, Thirteen Eleven, and Suicide & Co
by Peter Cowlam Jackie Marua, songwriter and music producer, has announced his latest project Thirteen Eleven, an autobiographical piece that has arisen, phoenix-like, from the ashes of his wife’s death, who after a struggle with depression took her own life in 2018. The couple were childhood sweethearts, and had been…
Climate Change
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Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation, by Sudeep Sen
Poems Reviewed by Peter Cowlam The term ‘Anthropocene’ has been proposed as the definition of the geological epoch dating from the start of significant human impact on the earth, and on its ecosystems. Anthropocene is also the title of Sudeep Sen’s latest (multi-genre) book of poetry, prose and photography –…
Bacon
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IN DEFENCE OF THE UPSTART CROW
Writers have a voice: Francis Bacon’s voice is not Shakespeare’s by Philip R. Hall Shakespeare is the author of his own work, not anyone else. Why should people try to separate Shakespeare from his own work? My rationale for this is quite simple; it’s a miguided attempt to hoard intellectual…
Ciarán O’Rourke
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“We’s Who’s the Earth is For”: Storm Visions
by Ciarán O’Rourke A decade ago I began to form a habit that in the intervening years has evolved into a strange passion: going to the cinema, and watching movies, alone. Two films in particular, from those early days, seemed so urgent and exhilarating, so attuned to what was then…
Feminism
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WAKE UP WOMEN OF INDIA!
We must become 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…
Derek Bright
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A SHORT HISTORY OF THE PILGRIM’S WAY
Approaching Kit’s Coty, photo Phil Hall, 2021 The Origins of the Old Road from Winchester to Canterbury by Derek Bright Over a century ago the writer Hillaire Belloc penned the term the ‘Old Road’ for an ancient trackway that ran between Winchester and Canterbury. Belloc’s work, entitled the ‘Old Road’…
Doors
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DOORWAYS TO MALI
The doors of the Dogon are great works of the imagination By Leigh Voigt Mali is in the middle of the bulge of Africa. In the middle of Mali, is Timbuktu; inaccessible, intriguing, fabled. The very word conjures up images of men in blue robes on camels in the desert….
Andy Hall
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MUSENGWA: BAREKNUCLE BOXING IN VENDA
“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…
Angela Davis
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Humane Socialism
Keir Hardie, Wikimedia Commons Dare to dream! Prepare to act! . Authoritarian Socialism? What is the obvious puzzle that all humane supporters of communism and socialism are faced with? The problem of authoritarian socialism. It claims to eliminate all forms of exploitation, while, at the same time, clamping down on…
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