Autumn, 2010 We are used to rain on All Saints’ Day. Half the leaves litter the floor and the other half cling to their branches until the next big gust of wind. Here comes winter. On Wednesday we should, but might not, know the outcome of the US Presidential Elections. The prospects this decade for… Read more

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what… Read more

This is a sketch of an idea for a possible way ahead. Any comments are more than welcome so this post can be improved. The global disruption wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic is on a scale not seen since World War II. The pandemic has made the air cleaner, the streets safer, and forced us… Read more

This COVID Spring is replete with pathetic fallacies. You can hear the birds, streets are safer for walkers and cyclists, the sky is no longer striated by aircraft fumes. In New Delhi children have seen a blue sky for the first time in their lives. Human have been forced to leave nature alone and the… Read more

‘History is bunk’ – so said Henry Ford, allegedly. He was wrong. Privacy is not ‘bunk’ either, but its debased currency in public policy debates certainly is. The current unfolding catastrophe has the rights to privacy and data protection under siege (or in lockdown, if you prefer) because, of course, all problems in the world… Read more

Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and towers: bleak hill-sides soften and fall in. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf was living in Rodmell, West Sussex when, on an early spring day during Britain’s… Read more

On WH Auden’s ‘The Cultural Presupposition’. ‘Happy the hare at morning’ – is a fine beginning to a poem.  And the ‘rampant suffering suffocating jelly’ sounds like the sort of pointless insult Boris Johnson would fling at Jeremy Corbyn. The poet surveys the inevitable decay and demise of all things. Art is humans flicking the… Read more

There are bad times just around the corner, We can all look forward to despair, It’s as clear as crystal From Brooklyn Bridge to Bristol That we can’t save Democracy And we don’t much care. The incessant heat and cloudless skies of this long summer have turned the dank and fickle Low Countries into the… Read more