An excerpt from THE AUDACITY OF HOPE (2006) by Barack Obama
More than once in our history we’ve seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent: we’ve seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, closed mindedness, and cruelty towards others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into a stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to acknowledge the [...]

“Boris Johnson has brushed aside a growing revolt of almost 100 of his own MPs and defied ongoing calls for Dominic Cummings to be sacked, despite a police investigation that failed to exonerate him for a potential breach of lockdown. The prime minister was again besieged by questions about his chief adviser as the crisis [...]

Jeff Tweedy (Wilco) On Song-Writing and Creativity:
I just like writing songs. It’s a natural state to me. I like to believe most people’s natural state is to be creative. It definitely was when we were kids, when being spontaneously and joyfully creative was just our default setting. As we grow we learn to evaluate and [...]

P.D. Ouspensky was born in Moscow in 1878. His first book THE FOURTH DIMENSION (1909), offered a contribution to mathematical theory: it was TERTIUM ORGANUM (1912) and A NEW MODEL OF THE UNIVERSE (1914) which revealed his stature as a thinker and his deep preoccupation with the problems of man’s existence. Ouspensky’s search for truth [...]

A Risk Too Far
We are told by UK government ministers that we have:
World leading health service
World leading technology
World leading science
World leading biotech

So why is it that the UK and its population has suffered more deaths than any other European nation from Covid-19? And that several South East Asian countries have beaten the UK in the [...]

DON McCULLIN IRRECONCILABLE TRUTHS
This three-volume boxed set is the definitive retrospective of the life and work of Don McCullin: one of the 20th Century’s greatest photographers.
The three books comprise almost 1,500 pages of print and more than 700 of his most iconic photographs and previously unpublished images curated by Don and reproduced from vintage or [...]