News of secret courts being introduced in the world’s oldest democracy should scare any rational human. The right to a public trial has survived feudalism, Henry VIII and the industrial revolution, but couldn’t stand up to the forces of global capitalism. Secret courts could be an idea from Alan Moore’s polemic on Thatcher’s Britain, V [...]
Philip K Dick’s partially autobiographical chronicle of 70s hippie drug culture takes place under the eternal sunshine of southern California. Even the book’s nighttime is saturated with the electric glare of strip mall lighting and the glow of the television screen. And in a society that never switches off the lights, the dark has become [...]
There’s a fictional quality to the closeted environment of the Edinburgh International Book festival. For two weeks, Charlotte Square is fortified with a circle of portable buildings and Spiegeltents, creating a safe space for a fantasy of literary culture to flourish without undue interference from the outside world. It’s a fantasy taking place in the daydreams of a [...]
There’s a logical fallacy in this club’s claims that it welcomes women members, which is rather like the rhetoric of the well-schooled military officer. Of course they want women in the army. It’s just, well, a soldier must be physically strong, naturally violent and preferably have a todger so you can pee standing up. Any woman who fulfils [...]
One of the maxims we’re all learning to live with in the early 21st century is that the extreme ends of any argument support each other’s existence. What would rightwing internet trolls do without leftwing reactionaries? How would al-Qaida go on, without neocon hatred fuelling its fire? And, of course, what would outraged atheists do [...]
The difference between ebooks and the internet is minimal, and we should be glad the two are growing closer and closer. It’s easy to forget that the world wide web as we know it today evolved from an early attempt to put books on the internet. When Tim Berners-Lee envisaged what would become the world [...]
This potent rite-of-passage tale offers readers some useful pointers on keeping the heart warm in allegorically wintry times. The novel that raised Haruki Murakami to literary superstardom ranges across the seasons, but the heart of its meaning is found in winter. When 30-something Toru Watanabe hears a fragment of the titular Beatles track after a long airplane [...]
