Essays
1st September 2024
The film Orlando: My Political Biography only went into cinemas in general release here this summer, so, although it was first shown at the EIFF in August 2023, it seems to be up for discussion again. The gender issue(s) is/are, indeed, still way up on the social agenda - as Johnny Rodger puts it, 'We are all on our social stages ... all in our social cages'. Preciado's openly self-constructed cage is a particularly intricate one, and he inhabits it with his own peculiar and provocative panache.
8th June 2024
What has been the scope of bigotry, racism, oppression and prejudice? Owen Dudley Edwards telescopes a whole history of the entanglement of those evils with the struggle for freedom, justice and truth into a compassionate and humane reading (and most importantly, an Irish reading) of the cornering and silencing of Diane Abbott, who was the first ever black woman elected to the Westminster Parliament.
5th June 2024
A unexpected quality, at once refined, maverick and committed, is given to the the term polymath in the work of Pippa Goldschmidt. She has written as much about exploration of psychic space in Freud and Lacan as about the astrological and intergalactic type. In her wonderful new book Night Vision she writes about her formation as an astrophysicist, and her description and history of anti-colonial outer space exploration is a reassuringly politicised view of the physical universe, free of the usual Hollywood astro-fantasies.
11th March 2024
As Emma Stone picks up an Oscar for Best Actress in Yorgos Lanthimos' film of Alasdair Gray's novel Poor Things, people are dancing in the streets of Glasgow! David Archibald reviews a film that coulda, shoulda, woulda...
21st February 2024
A history of seventy years of popular music in Scotland by Simon Frith, Martin Cloonan and John Williamson is fascinating and comprehensive in its introduction to the story , writes Sheena Macdonald in review.
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.
9th January 2024
Mostar’s Partisan Memorial Cemetery - The most significant anti-fascist architectural landmark in the former Yugoslavia has been neglected and left as a ruin for decades. Having survived the 1990s Bosnian war, the Partisan Memorial Cemetery in Mostar now faces its biggest threat – and possible disappearance – as neofascists are intent on destroying the necropolis and all it stands for....
COALITION OF WATERS:
On Wounded Bodies in Capitalistic Time
Rupali Patil & Agnieszka Kilian