The Politics of Dancing

The American Spy, Fifth Columnists, Anti-Semitism and the Churchill Roosevelt Correspondence Nineteen Weeks: America, Britain, and the Fateful Summer of 1940 Norman Moss, Houghton Mifflin; Reprint edition (9 Nov. 2004) Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms: The Spyhunter, the Fashion Designer & the Man From Moscow, Paul Willetts; Constable (1 Oct. 2015). The ‘special relationship’ between the US and Great Britain is supposed to have reached its zenith in 1940, in the form of the correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill. Both of these books deal with this period and both deal with the content of this correspondence, there however the similarities end, for both books could not be more different. Moss takes a cold clinical look at the transatlantic relationship during the nineteen weeks between the fall of France and the cancellation of Operation Sea Lion, the Germans planned invasion of southern England. He shines a light on US collusion with British covert ...

AUSTERITY AND THE ASSAULT ON THE PUBLIC LIBRARY SERVICE  Public libraries are beacons, they shine a light on the kind of society we live in; free for all to use, uncensored and open, warm places in which to read, research or just indulge in the sheer serendipity of dipping into books you would not buy but which turn out to be full of surprising insights or stimulating prose. The Joy of Serendipity  All civilised societies value literacy and learning, value books and engagement with books. Of course we now live in an age when information is much more readily available and books can be read on electronic devices capable of storing thousands of titles. However libraries have pretty much risen to the challenges of new technology, indeed the library is sometimes the only place where some people can gain access to the internet. But there are also the children’s sections in libraries, few things being more heartening than watching children discover books. And then there ...

PARIS AND SOCIAL MEDIA SOLIDARITY When natural, or manmade disaster, or terrorist atrocity strikes the reverberations are immediately felt on social media. We live in an age when our immediate shock, horror, anger, despair and depression can be immediately communicated to hundreds, even thousands of friends and strangers alike. Without pausing to reflect or consider raw emotion pours out onto Twitter timelines and Facebook pages. I have reacted in this way myself. Merely tweeting ‘bastards,’ providing some small outlet, a little therapeutic relief perhaps. Then as the initial reaction passes the desire to show support and solidarity becomes the pre-eminent emotion. Of course some will rush to the scene to help, give blood, and comfort the bereaved and injured. These however will always be a minority, most people caught up in the business of living, meeting the demands made by work, children and loved ones. So in the age of social media they chose to add a flag or symbol to the...

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Accept the Bomb. I n the early 1980's I was an active supporter of CND. I marched, I protested, and in Easter 1983 I held hands to form a human chain linking the US nuclear bases in southern England. Human Chain Easter 1983 My support was not purely based upon a deep abhorrence of nuclear weapons, - what sane person doesn’t feel such abhorrence. No, I was as much concerned by the gung-ho attitude of the Reagan and Thatcher governments of the period. With all the talk of missile defence shields and ‘tactical’ devices you did not have to feel especially paranoid to think that, Reagan in particular, they were just mad enough to use them. So I don’t regret my involvement not even that we might have proved useful to Russian propagandists; ‘playing into the hands of…’   always a weak argument, particularly when moral issues are concerned. I have however changed my mind and I could no longer support CND. My abhorrence of these we...

This is a slightly amended review written for The Nour Festival Blog ALGERIANISM Patrick Altes Algerianism, if considered at all, in this country tends to be conceptualised as coming in a box marked pied noir, - often wrongly associated with the work of Albert Camus. The French rather than Algerian element taking precedence. This Exhibition however represents a confident exploration by Algerians seeking to explore their own complex identity, though the ghosts of French occupation, colonial presence and influence on Algerian culture is very much present as well.  Now of course the idea that Algeria and metropolitan France were as one was not only absurd but also camouflaged the reality of French imperialism, racism and brutality. That said the French presence in Algeria introduced a unique element into Algerian culture, and it is the ghost of this presence that haunts the pictures of Patrick Altes, a French artist, in which images of the past and present are fused t...

This morning we have fog.   I have always had a fondness for fog and mist, covering and concealing, revealing half formed shapes, deformed motor cars, ghostly trees, as if the world were lit by candlelight. English literature is replete with wonderful descriptions of fog, Dickens, Conrad and Conan Doyle all make use of London pea soupers, although they are in truth describing smog, a much denser substance. One literary evocation however has always stayed with me, it comes from Jean Paul Sartre in ‘Nausea.’ “Suppose he were dead…this thought had occurred to me. It is just the sort of idea you get in foggy weather…it was cold and dark. The fog was filtering in under the door, it was going to rise slowly and envelope everything.”