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 or so, but since then there has been little to get excited about amid the plethora of vacuous tripe proffered by the mainstream. …

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 an apartheid state whose brutality and savagery is compounded by the claims of its various representatives at home and supporters further afield, professional liars all, to be acting in the name of security.

‘The crimes pile up until they become invisible.’ So said Bertolt Brecht and how right he was.

…

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 the game’s top players in the same era. These were men who understood the importance of football to working class communities, its crucial role in providing excitement, pride and the opportunity for temporary escape from the banality of life lived as an appendage to the machine. …

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 British Monarchy. The BBC in particular has lost its mind, devoting an entire’s day’s programming to sanctifying the legacy of an open racist whose life was spent living in the lap of luxury at the UK taxpayer’s expense.

You could be forgiven for thinking Prince Phillip fought and won 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 abortive German revolutions on the back of which was born the beast of fascism, carried in his head a creative brain of inordinate force. …

Really really fine piece of writing, James.

Agree with every word.

As only he can, Albert Camus in his classic 1947 novel, The Plague, mines the human condition in the midst of a crisis in which solidarity, selflessness and mutuality are the means of survival, and in which individualism, selfishness and self regard are death itself.

Camus:

This whole thing is not about heroism. It’s about decency. It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.

The personal and social struggle forced upon us by Covid has been extraordinarily revelatory in what it’s revealed about our common humanity. …

A new BBC documentary on the rise and fall of Lance Armstrong, the former poster boy for sporting excellence who suffered a vertiginous fall from grace over revelations that his spectacular achievements as a racing cyclist were underpinned by extensive doping, reminds that there remains a vast gulf between knowledge and understanding in human affairs.

In this respect, the furore that was whipped up over his exposure as a ‘drugs cheat’ in 2012 reflected more the mass ignorance that surrounds the issue of drugs in sport than it did the integrity (or lack thereof) of Lance Armstrong. …