Seven years or so since it first appeared it seems ‘that bloody sign’ is still with us. Some time around 2009, soon after the banking crisis, a stark poster featuring the words ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ set in a Gill Sans-ish typeface, topped by the Royal crest, began to appear here and there.
What is hope? What would it mean to wish that 2016 will be any better than 2015? As we enter the New Year the latest book by the prolific Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism, offers a brief but wide-ranging meditation on the meaning of a seemingly simple concept that escapes easy definition.
Yesterday evening I started to put together some notes for a short post about David Bowie’s new album Blackstar, released just last week. Today I find myself writing, with great sadness, a few words about his death.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is arguably the most keenly anticipated film in movie history. Though Return of the Jedi, the final episode of the first Star Wars trilogy, was released more than 30 years ago the colossal cultural impact of George Lucas’s space opera continues to resonate.
Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams imagines a ‘post-work economy’ in a world beyond neoliberalism.
A new collection by electronica pioneer John Foxx imagining the rewilding of London offers a sonic tour through a new green city including ‘The Glades of Soho’ and ‘The Hanging Gardens of Shoreditch’.
In an age ever more obsessed with the importance of crafting effective political ‘stories’ and ‘narratives’, Jacqueline Mulhallen’s Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary is a timely review of the life and work of a poet writing 200 years ago acutely aware of the vital role the imagination plays in extending the horizons of political possibility.