The Great Lockdown of 2020 Being forced to stay at home for weeks on end allows the energetic and self-directed to invent new ways of filling their time with productive and satisfying activity. This would be an interesting topic for Marxist thinkers to develops in terms of alienated labour. However, for someone as basically idle …
Who Writes Our History?
Sarah Helm's If This is A Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women is the most important and best history book I have read in a long while. It is a gruelling read full of horror and evil, redeemed in part by extraordinary acts of courage, compassion, heroism, solidarity and generosity. But it would be foolish …
Mental Health and Left-Wing Politics
This short essay is an attempt to answer the question ‘what can be done to make it easier for people with mental distress to get involved in left-wing politics?’. As such it needs to be stated at the start that the essay is a complete failure; it raises a lot of questions and issues but …
Broadchurch’s Gauntlet
Broadchurch has been a television programme of quite exceptional brilliance and importance. Any proper analysis would need at least one repeated viewing and so will have to wait for the box set. However a few of the more obvious features can be noted at this point. In the first place the programme has given the …
Top Telly
I am again indebted to HarpyMarx (http://harpymarx.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/guardians-top-50-television-dramas-of-all-time/) for this list from The Guardian of their Top 50 TV Dramas. Like many others I love a list as long as it is not patently absurd, and this one, although one might disagree with it, is certainly not that. Here is the list... 1. The Sopranos 2. …
Bits and Pieces – June 2012
Shostakovich 10 A wonderful performance of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony by the CBSO under the mesmerising Andris Nelsons. Shostakovich is a site of ideological battle, his music fiercely contested and debated, with every sort of hidden meaning detected which might make it acceptable to anti-communist listeners. At the root of this is a problem that conventional …
A Collation of Links
This entry is somewhat remarkable in that consists solely of links to other people’s blog entries with almost no discussion or intervention. I do most heartily commend all of the pieces, but admit that it also functions as an easy historical record for me of a period in which I have not blogged. I suppose …
A Sick Society
The attack on sickness benefits has been going on for a number of years but has been vastly accelerated by the LibCons. This attack is both a personal and political matter for me. It has been brilliantly covered in a number of articles by HarpyMarx which I link to below. I wanted however to both …
Fire and Circuses
Although I do not want to spend all my time looking backwards and I have already offered some thoughts on the past 18 months, I must not overlook some of the best things I have read on the net. It is, after all, from the net, in the form of email, blogs and links to …
Crabbe – Tale 15: Advice or, The Squire and The Priest
As we shall see, there is a sense in which this Tale follows on directly from Tale 14 - it too has as a central concern the effects upon a young man of having his conscience awakened. This raises again the question of the way in which certain Tales are grouped and the order in …
Continue reading Crabbe – Tale 15: Advice or, The Squire and The Priest
Moving Toyshop 