Commentary
19th April 2025
I am a walker – I love walking. I love the freedom of roaming around, being curious, looking for often-missed details. I walk on mycommute to work; I walk to get my steps
in; I walk to take photographs for content for my Twitter and Instagram pages; I walk out of necessity because inner-city parking is too costly and too stressful and public transport is increasingly getting more expensive. I am a proud pedestrian.
4th April 2025
Owen Dudley Edwards rewrites the understanding of genre and sees satire as a form of literary criticism. His knowledge of mid-twentieth century literature is both encyclopaedic and peculiar. Wodehouse, for example, is always an anomaly, but using his works as a handrail to guide us round the voids created by a current day fascist is weirdly novel.
21st December 2024
As an historian of American politics, who followed John F Kennedy round the USA on his election campaign in the 60s, is there a writer with a longer view of the Presidency than Irishman Owen Dudley Edwards? - It takes a bit of wit too, to be wider than the current President-Elect. Here is the perennial Edwards, as always, delivering more - as Marx said of Lincoln - than he promised.
13th February 2024
How does an artist use material and form to engage directly with all aspects, emotional personal social, political of the world around her? Artist Rupali Patil speaks to curator Agnieszka Kilian about the possibilities for instant and profound expression in drawing and printmaking.
7th February 2024
Putting the writing and rewriting of state affairs by politicians in a long and broadly detailed context, Owen Dudley Edwards wonders if 'The self-destruction of the would-be partisan is becoming a literary form in UK political life'? Reviews of new books by Theresa May, Chris Bryant and Rory Stewart.
23rd January 2024
Rory Olcayto's assessment of the Glasgow problematic is highly controversial and has been doing the rounds and garnering much critical attention. The straight-talking, complacency-busting analysis and vision for a metropolitan city cannot possibly please everyone, and that, it seems, is precisely the partisan, feather-ruffling intention of the former Architects Journal editor. It was, indeed, first delivered as a talk to the Royal incorporation of Architects in Scotland. Here it is now as a readily accessible text: a provocation to civic and urban action.
2nd November 2023
From Classical Antiquity through Michelangelo to Verlaine, via Godard and Tarkovsky and an essay-load of other makers, Murdo Macdonald shows us how the whole gang of western clever clogs in turn feel the pain of Laocoon - for if art shows us anything it is this: that nothing exists for sure, except the torture of the knowledge that is so, and will be so forever.
22nd October 2023
First in a scheduled triptych of albums, composer Claire M Singer's Saor, will be released digitally and on CD by Touch on 3rd November. Neil Cooper talks to her about her composing and playing career in, and her love for organs and organ music.
ANALOGUES OF McEWAN by Johnny Rodger