Book Bites: Stoner by John Williams

Stoner has substance, gravity and it stays with you afterwards. What it reminds me of is the enchantment of the book and its suggestion that literature itself might be the best way of understanding life.

Revolutionizing Construction… post-Brexit

85 – 92% of new housing is constructed using traditional brick/block masonry construction, a labour-intensive mode of building that has ostensibly remained the same for centuries.

Morandi Bridge: Ronan Point de nos jours

The tragedy of the Morandi Bridge built in the mid-1960s (and named after the civil engineer Riccardo Morandi) collapsed on 14 August 2018.

Review: Make Futurism Great Again

The art works relating to this project comprise a mix of early futurist paintings, a collection of audio-visual displays and an exhibit of a light purple fluid that “captures the essence of the Futurist movement”

Labour Live: Bread & Circuses

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell boasted: ‘It will be magical what we can do for society.’ Eddie Izzard insisted that ‘we need to articulate a vision’. David Lammy, quoting the wrong president, yelled: ‘We’re taking our country back!’

China’s environmental transformation

“The environment” has long exercised the minds of the Chinese government. It was one of the first developing nations to introduce sustainable development on a national and regional policy level and it rewrote its Constitution way back in 1982 – five years before the Brundtland Report – pledging to “protect the environment”.

Blade Runner’s Retro Futures

by Dr. H J McCracken

We are now only two years from the dateline of the original Blade Runner. Ray Bradbury’s melancholic future of Martian settlement and abandonment, The Martian Chronicles, has since long passed, and along with it of course, 1984.

Book Review: After Europe by Ivan Krastev

Ivan Krastev is a respected, left-wing intellectual and professor at Sofia University. He has written several pithy books, mainly about democracy. His commentaries are insightful, with colourful details and images enlivening his academic prose.

Book Review: The New Philistines by Sohrab Ahmari

Ahmari packs his polemic with a pistol in his pocket, gunning for what he perceives as the art world’s ‘obsession with identity politics’ which he argues has come to dominate and disfigure our culture.

The middle-class home

Compared to the many stories recorded about the British aristocracy or the Dickensian working class in London, there is still very little known about the capital’s middle classes and their domestic lives.