In a 1992 interview with Arthur Miller, Charlie Rose asked him what quality the great playwrights have shared in common, distinguishing them from the not so great ones in any given age?
After a pause to gather his thoughts, Miller replied that the “big ones share a fierce moral sensibility”…
I missed the first aircraft smashing into the Twin Towers on 9/11, but I had the news on when the second aircraft struck not long thereafter. …
I couldn’t believe my luck when I landed the job as a security guard at the Marina Marketplace Mall in Marina Del Rey.
It was mid-February 1992, I was 25, allegedly in my prime, and I’d been in LA five weeks with my funds by now dwindling fast.
Desperation had…
The encomiums to the courage of the British troops who participated in the Afghan airlift have come thick and fast from a government that has been fighting a desperate rearguard action against the understandable and justifiable criticism it has received throughout this debacle.
While the courage of the troops is…
Empires advance and empires retreat, though not in circumstances of their own choosing — to borrow from one Karl Marx — and certainly never smoothly or without upending entire regions, countries and societies in their wake.
What has and continues to unfold in Afghanistan is nothing less than a historic…
Modern literature lacks the epic works that encompass and define the times in which we live, capturing that elusive but necessary timelessness symptomatic of the profundity required of a classic.
Perhaps Don Delilio’s Underworld (1997) is the closest there has been to claiming that mantle over the past thirty years…
Here we are again, watching one of the most powerful and technologically advanced military’s in the world setting about the ‘heroic’ task of murderously assaulting one of the most subjugated, oppressed and immiserated.
Those brave warriors of the IDF — soldiers, airmen and sailors — constitute the armed wing of…
Think British football and the names that instantly spring to mind are men who transcended the sport to achieve the status of working class heroes and icons.
Messrs Shankly, Stein, Clough, and Ferguson were cut from the same granite in terms of their working class roots, as were many of…
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse in this post-Brexit, post-colonial husk of a sinking ship otherwise known as the UK, it does.
The death of Prince Phillip at 99 has produced a veritable flood of servile paeans to the most regressive, archaic, anti-democratic institution in Europe, the…
Amid the pages of Bertolt Brecht’s classic collection, The Svendborg Poems, you encounter the following verse:
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”
Brecht, who came of age during the First World War and who lived through two…
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