Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
George Gordon Lord Byron was born in London on 22 January 1788. In 1794, he inherited the title Baron Byron on the death of his great uncle, and was titled Lord Byron in 1798. He attended Harrow and went on to study at Cambridge in 1805. Here he published his […]
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest announces itself dramatically, with a blank screen and two minutes of foreboding music by Mica Levi heralding something ominous and important. The film, loosely based on the Martin Amis novel of the same name, centres around the professional and family life of Rudolf Höss, […]
It is important to distinguish between wars of oppression and liberation wars, between imperialist invasion and resistance to it. Anti-imperialist wars create a different consciousness among the population. In early 1942, the artist Sofia Sergeyevna Uranova (1910-1988) was drafted and remained in her division until the end of the war, […]
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest announces itself dramatically, with a blank screen and two minutes of foreboding music by Mica Levi heralding something ominous and important. The film, loosely based on the Martin Amis novel of the same name, centres around the professional and family life of Rudolf Höss, […]
From its outset, International Women’s Day was characterised by the fight for peace, against militarism and war. At the Second International Conference of Socialist Women at Copenhagen in 1910, resolutions concerning the “maintenance of peace” and “to combat internationally militarism and secure peace” were tabled in response to the growing […]
Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) speaks to us again today with great intensity. Why has this painting become so indelibly engraved in the collective memory of the human community? The figure not only hears the scream, he is also screaming in despair. His hands cover the ears to protect them […]
The painter of Renaissance humanism Hans Holbein the Younger, born in Augsburg in the winter of 1497/98, was one of the foremost German painters of Renaissance humanism. Augsburg was the seat of the Fugger family, trading magnates and bankers. Jakob Fugger “the Rich,” elevated to the nobility of the Holy […]
Following my previous article on ChatGPT and machine learning models, I would like to shed some further light on why those models should be heavily scrutinised and monitored. So I’m going to share with you a personal story to demonstrate how they can end up being used to expropriate free […]
The emergence of the bourgeoisie between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries from traders, merchants and artisans marked the beginning of the modern, capitalist era, beginning in Italy. This new social class, seeking political power to underpin and further its growing economic might, found expression in the Renaissance, which displayed its […]
Dublin may not boast quite the same scene as other cities, nor does Ireland in general, but no journey through any urban centre is devoid of the plague of advertising or of the sight of its counterpart, graffiti. Opposing sides of the same coin, they both involve the co-option of […]
The title of Robert Ballagh’s painting The Thirtieth of January makes clear its connection to Goya’s The Third of May. But of course the visual language is also compelling. While in Goya’s picture the outline of Madrid sets the location of the executions in 1808, in Ballagh’s it is the […]
Born 450 years ago, on 29 September 1571, Caravaggio lived during the Counter-Reformation. The art form of that time, with a specific political function, was the Baroque. The development of the new middle class—the bourgeoisie—brought with it the dawn of the modern, capitalist era. The artistic expression of this new […]
Albrecht Dürer was born 550 years ago, on 21 May 1471, during the Renaissance, a time of upheaval that rang in the early modern age. With improved production methods, industry and trade grew rapidly, bringing with them more money and the strengthening of a new middle class. Modern science developed, […]