Culture

Given how frequently the international community uses violence to resolve political conflicts, it is perhaps not surprising that film and TV reflect this. The myth of redemptive violence is a powerful and familiar cultural theme, and, as the excellent documentary Tough Guise (Media Education Foundation) points out, our heroes get tougher and stronger, carrying bigger weapons each year. So it’s always refreshing to find a TV programme prepared to accept that life is more complex than this.…

The trouble with short story anthologies is that you can never quite tell what you’re going to get. Unless you are familiar with all the writers in the collection, you just have to dive in and hope for the best. Welcome to the Greenhouse is a typical anthology in this regard. Since I’m not a sci-fi fan I’d never heard of any of the authors, and so I dipped in not knowing what to expect.

What I got was a mixed bag. Some fine stories, some dull, some too badly written to finish. The…

In Paris, Dora Maar was in tears and Picasso had found the subject for the painting he had been commissioned to do by the Spanish republican government for the Spanish pavilion at the international exhibition that was due to open in the French capital in May. With time running out, the exhibition finally opened on the 1900 exhibition site between the Champs de Mars and the Trocadero in June. The Spanish pavilion was not ready until July.

Picasso worked quickly with an intense fury of…

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Emily Johns’ collection of pictures was exhibited at the University of Wales, Trinity St David in Carmarthen on 6 May. The event was hosted by the chaplaincy. The planning was undertaken by chaplain Ainsley Griffiths, the well known bardic poet Mererid Hopwood, Jeni Williams, poet and tutor at the University of Wales, Amnesty International and myself.

Mererid Hopwood read, in Welsh and in English, a moving poem she had composed for the occasion. Oghpgho Okpako from the Niger Delta…

Nicolas Kent, artistic director of the Tricycle theatre. PHOTO: Milan Rai

The Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, north London, marking its 30th anniversary this year, is world-famous for its “tribunal plays”, which have focused attention on crucial issues by bringing to new life transcripts of public inquiries. In 1994, Half the Picture dramatised the Scott arms to Iraq inquiry, followed by Nuremburg (on the 50th anniversary of the 1946 war crimes…

PHOTO: Fred Chance

I was going to belatedly write about the London demo against cuts but have been waylaid by a novel written by HG Wells in 1913. The World Set Free is one of his prophetic screeds in which – by the 1970s – everything is produced, manufactured, and propelled by nuclear power. In his preface to the 1921 edition, he claimed, with uncharacteristic modesty, “the misses in the story far outnumber the hits”. I found his novel unreadable but his preface had this to say about…

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At first I thought that Sober Living for the Revolution was about historical, successful “sober” anarchist collectives and how they organised. The first part of the title misled me. Then I read the rest of the title which went on as “Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge, and Radical Politics”. Second thoughts: “Oh no! Interviews with a bunch of straight-edgers!” To be honest, being into hardcore punk, I never got into the whole straight edge scene in the same way that Ian Mackaye didn’t (whose song…

I was in two minds as to how to write up the interview with Nicolas Kent. Our usual format in PN is to just to present the transcript of the interview, and that’s what we did in the end (for an unusually long three pages), but I was very tempted to write it up in a more traditional journalistic style. These notes are a small move to bringing a bit more of the flavour of the thing over.

When I called up to arrange the interview, Nicolas Kent was very gracious, but it was clear he was…

Chorus:

We will rise, we will rise
We will not accept those politicians’ lies
So come on get out and fight, unite against the right
We will rise, we will rise!

“Cut it all”, cries Cameron; “cut them off”, cries Clegg
“If you lose your livelihood, well, just go out and beg!
One and all must share the pain, ’cause we have done the sums
We’re all in this together - oh, but not our banker chums!”

The government goes on about this Big…

In February, “Unite for Peace”, a group of (mainly) Christian peace activists affiliated with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, gathered in Derbyshire for our twice-yearly meeting. This weekend was particularly special as it was our tenth anniversary – an opportunity to step back and think about previous gatherings and what it is that keeps us together.

We all live in different parts of the country and have busy jobs, and some of us have families too. It’s an effort to take time out…

This collection of spoken word and song was originally a project for the 250th anniversary of Paine’s birth. The spoken element consists of quotations from Paine’s work, newspaper reports and diary entries from the period. The songs address contemporary issues and are performed with the passion and sincerity one has come to expect from Leon Rosselson and Robb Johnson.

The excellent sleeve notes by the performers chart the development of the project since its beginning in 1987. The…