Anyone who managed to avoid the cold, dead hand of British trotskyism and its moonie like cult worship of leaders past and present in the 1970s and beyond, often gravitated towards various continental radical ideas instead. Italian ‘autonomism’ became particularly seductive, with the legendary stories of the Italian hot autumn. To cement the sentimentality, the […]

Patrick Hamilton’s ‘Hangover Square’ has been dramatised, and is on stage at the Finborough theatre in Chelsea. It has had good reviews, and the tickets aren’t the usual West End rip-off. Like most of Hamilton’s work, Hangover Square is quite brilliant. Set in the kind of 1930s London George Orwell would have recognised, it’s so […]

Hegel spoke of ‘the lacerated consciousness of the bohemian.’ In 2008, it is lacerated to the point of collapse. The Glastonbury festival has just finished, and as each year goes by, the spectacle becomes increasingly more tragic. This year, the ultimate insult has to be the installation of CCTV cameras, with cops roaming the site […]

For many pinko-leftists, the current economic crisis boils down to the fact that profitability across all sectors is everywhere in decline. Such a partial analysis leads to a one-sided critique, based on the role of distribution alone in the creation of inequality. However, the crucial factor missing from explanations of the economic crisis in […]

In 1943, when the German high command went to see Hitler in order to set up an atomic weapons project, they said to him: “Mein Fuhrer, we need to take the work of Albert Einstein into consideration if we want to build a nuclear bomb.” Hitler went beserk. As he chewed the carpet, he declared: […]

Reports are reaching us of villagers in Zimbabwe having hands and limbs chopped off by Mugabe’s thugs, because they may have dared to refuse to vote in the recent ‘election.’ Below we reprint an extract from Neil Larsen’s article ‘Thoughts on Violence and Modernity in Latin America, in Light of Arno Mayer’s The Furies.’ […]

Jens Hagestedt writes: “In 1933 Theodor Adorno wrote a highly compromising text (that fortunately was never published) to encourage those in charge of the then ’streamlined’ radio of the German dictatorship to use their powers to put an end ‘once and for all’ to what was rather indelicately referred to as ‘Schlager’  (German pop music […]

A great writer has died: Albert Cossery. Born in 1913, in Cairo, he died in Paris on Monday, 22 June. he was 94. He made a philosophy and a subject for his novels out of destitution and laziness: “He was the laziest of all writers and he was proud of it. ‘Look at […]

The Fall’s Mark E Smith is worshipped by some as an exemplar of authenticity. He knocks out one album one after another, and over the years has got through hundreds of musicians.  To hang around with Smith is no joke. His ex-girlfriend is now a dog-handler: she must have learnt the trade through living with […]

Some innovative Japanese  have created and marketed a washing machine - for people.  After a days’ work, commuters can relax and be cleaned from head to toe. The only trouble to forsee is if the machine goes beserk…