At a tiny hamlet in the Mississippi Delta there stands Bryant’s Grocery. Here in August 1955, a 14-year-old black youth from Chicago, Emmett Till, allegedly flirted with Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. Several days later, Emmett’s body surfaced, tortured and mutilated, in the nearby Tallahatchie River. Carolyn Bryant’s husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam […]
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Many of us have watched costume dramas about the Tudor period. My favourite image is of Charles Laughton scoffing a whole chicken carcass in the 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024473/) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4tOb9J7W2k). More recently there has been the TV drama series ‘The Tudors’ (2007-2010) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0758790/). These, combined with school history reading, have fixed
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Five hundred years ago Europeans were exploring their world like never before by crossing the oceans. In the second half of the twentieth century humans broke out of Earth’s atmosphere. It was all part of man’s great adventure – landing on the Moon and sending a rover to Mars, finally seeing the edge of the
This New Ocean by William E. Burrows Read More »
For more than three decades, Svetlana Alexievich (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/21/svetlana-alexievich-interview) has been the memory and conscience of the twentieth century. When the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize, it cited her invention of ‘a new kind of literary genre’. The quality of her work is seen in The Unwomanly Face of War, in which she chronicles the experiences
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Each of the brutal and repressive regimes that have ever existed have been brutal and repressive in their own uniquely interesting ways. The Soviet Union takes its place among these. Journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2007/jan/25/pressandpublishing.booksobituaries) wandered across the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991. His sharply observed travelogue illuminates the tragedy of 20th-century Soviet history and
Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski Read More »
India often conjures up images of endemic poverty, superstition and entrenched social structures. A country doomed to perpetual backwardness. If so, think again. India is now a burgeoning economic and geopolitical giant. The country has the 21st century stamped on it more visibly than any other nation after China and the United States. India
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Our primate relations on the tree of life go on raiding parties. (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/jun/21/chimpanzees-territory-killing-neighbours) They have a deep instinct to conquer and dominate, establishing rule over territory. So it is with us. None of the empires in human history (Roman, Chinese, Persian, Mongol, British) got established without violence, massacre and repression. And if one had to
From the advent of Fauvism to the development of Dada, the early part of the twentieth century saw a series of avant-garde movements in European literature, music, and painting, which fundamentally re-examined the languages of the arts. The strength of Early Modernism by Christopher Butler is its treatment of the great movements of this period in
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A People’s History of the United States chronicles American history from the bottom up, acting as a corrective to the official version of history taught in schools (with its emphasis on great men in high places), to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace. Since first publication in 1980 this book has been
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