Book Bites: Peter Magyar’s Pen Zen Diaries
At its simplest, this book will teach you to draw and to learn from the process; with simple line studies and ink renderings. “Architects,” he says, “should aspire to reflect and invent the best of the present, and weigh its value in the future”.
Book Bites: Sennett’s ‘Building and Dwelling’
Anyone who thinks about the City and its relationship to people, should be interested in this book. It is complex in the same way that a city and its relationships to people is complex.
The World Cities Culture Report
The report recognises that revitalising and capitalising on a city’s cultural life plays out differently in vastly contrasting contexts.
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.
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.
Book Review: The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart
By Justine Brian | 03 June 2017 ‘The Road to Somewhere’ is a sometimes brilliant, but ultimately frustrating and flawed, attempt to understand contemporary Western politics, as seen through the apparent realignment in British society in the wake of the shock Brexit vote in 2016. Relying on a wealth of surveys and polls, Goodhart argues we are seeing the creation, or perhaps clarification, of “two great subterranean value blocs of...
Book Review: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
by Martin Earnshaw | 02 April 2017 After the election of Donald Trump last year protesters chanted that he was “not my president”. Hyperbolic rhetoric is the prerogative of the protester but for years now it has seemed that the USA is not one but two countries. Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind has been hugely influential in understanding this problem. Haidt sees the political differences between red states and blue states as...
A Chinese Utopia?
Review by Pierre Shaw [ Oct 2016] Shenzhen is the city of miraculous conception, born from nothing and yet emerging now as one of the planet’s most ferociously rapid urban developing city. From humble border town beginnings just 35 years ago, Shenzhen has thrown itself onto the world stage projecting its population from 300,000 to 12 – 15 million (no-one seems to know the exact figures). It is yet another step in China’s march...
Home is where the Art is
‘Re:Home’ is Cressida Brown’s revisit and revision to her 2006 play, ‘Home’. This new version is set and performed in-situ at Waltham Forest’s infamous, and now demolished, Beaumont Estate high rise tower blocks.
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