Jeremy Corbyn managed the unusual achievement of turning up on the rostrum at the TUC conference so late that he missed his own standing ovation. Hundreds of delegates rose as one as he was announced. They clapped, they cheered, some chanted “Jez we can”. And they clapped and cheered. And clapped and cheered some more until the tumult peetered into disappointed silence.
What a miserable spectacle. There was never going to be an easy solution to Europe’s worst refugee crisis for 70 years. The EU has somehow contrived to make itself part of the problem.
On my last visit to Syria, five years ago, the restoration of the Great Mosque in Aleppo was finally complete after many years' work.
When is charitable giving just a price cut? Memphis Barker (15 September) is correct to question what exactly makes up a charity.
When is charitable giving just a price cut? Memphis Barker (15 September) is correct to question what exactly makes up a charity.
When I was 10, I thought robots already ran our lives. It was 1984, when the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World was at peak popularity. After a cross-country match, I was driven home by my PE teacher who missed the turning to our road. When I told her, she said: “Oh sorry, I’d gone on to auto-pilot.” For about half an hour, I was seriously impressed that my teacher had a car that could drive itself at the touch of some secret button, until I got home and my Dad told me it was just a figure of speech.
Tanya Ronder's new play has been causing alarm at the box office, because theatregoers don't want to say its name. "That one with the polar bears," they say, or "the play that opens in September". This coyness is prompted by the play's title, "Fuck the Polar Bears".
When composers unveil new works, they do not generally want the audience to nod off. Not so Max Richter. The intention behind his latest piece, Sleep – which is eight hours long – is that his listeners should slumber peacefully throughout. He has termed it "my personal lullaby for a frenetic world" and "a manifesto for a slower pace of existence". The world premiere, on 26 September, will apparently offer beds instead of chairs – and as it is broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 you can even try it at home. Читать дальше...
We may live in a global economy, the forces of which so often seem beyond human control, certainly beyond national politicians’ control. But just sometimes a financial decision by a group of people in one country will send a shockwave around the world, and we are about to witness that this week.
A fortnight ago three-year old Aylan Kurdi's picture is splashed across the world's newspapers and social media after he was found dead on the shores of Turkey. In publishing that picture, and highlighting European indifference to Syrian suffering, was the media using him? Some certainly argued that point. But that picture also made a point about the refugee crisis more effectively than a thousand angry editorials, and perhaps even saved the lives of many more Syrians. Images have the power to provoke us into debate. Читать дальше...
As a middle-class woman living in the South-east of England, I have a better chance of living a long life than almost anyone else in the country. Were I to be a working-class man in the North of the country, the odds are that I would live an entire decade less. That is a deeply disturbing state of affairs – and especially for a wealthy country which has boasted, for almost 70 years, a health service freely available to anyone who needs it.
Officially, Doctor Who returns to BBC1 this Saturday. But for this fan the new season began, in spirit at least, a week ahead of schedule. From its inception last Saturday, the age of Jeremy Corbyn has had the unmistakable flavour of one of those episodes in which the Tardis slips through a tear in the space-time vortex, and into a parallel universe where everything looks the same but is entirely different.
Jeremy Corbyn has been heavily criticised for the lack of female and BME politicians featured in his Shadow Cabinet. The main complaint is that the so-called "top four" jobs have gone to four middle-aged white men.
The economic project that has dominated politics since the 1970s has had at its heart the strangulation of the Trade Unions. Why? Because it is the unions which stand as a last line of defence against repeated Government attempts to privatise, deregulate and cut back on the public services upon which we all rely.
Hope has been restored to the Labour Party. Hope of ending austerity and poverty in the world’s fourth richest country. Hope of dismantling our nuclear weapons. And hope of providing refuge to desperate people fleeing war and persecution. Jeremy Corbyn is a stumbling block to the neoliberal consensus and seemingly a saviour of the Labour left.
The ingredients for Covent Garden’s new Orphee et Eurydice make the mind boggle. Direction is shared between a choreographer (the Israeli Hofesh Shechter) and a house director (John Fulljames), with 115 people almost constantly on stage: Shechter’s dance company, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists under John Eliot Gardiner’s direction, plus Amour (Amanda Forsythe), Orphee (Juan Diego Florez), and Eurydice (Lucy Crowe).
Last week, while I was in Lebanon, I spoke to a group of child labourers living in an informal refugee camp. These girls and boys with exhausted faces and dirt underneath their fingernails were all under the age of 14. What were they going to use their wages for? “To rebuild our houses in Syria, when the war is over and we can go back home,” they replied.
Peoples’ Quantitative Easing is both radical and dangerous. But it may also be the best tool we have to deal with the legacy of previous policy mistakes.
I stare at the wreckage in front of me, and see a living room that will no longer host family parties, celebrate birthdays, or host grandparents. Low murmurs stir the silence. Naser, the uncle of the baby who had burned in the wreckage, stands nearby. His face is gaunt. His eyes exhausted. His silence as heavy as the air.
You may think that you know how many people you’ve had sex with, but a new study shows that you may be wrong.
May 2015: It was my first time in court, and I was trying to get information on the seedier side of Bahrain’s relationship with the UK. I was the appellant. Also present was Edward Oakden, a senior British diplomat defending the Foreign Office’s Decision to withhold sensitive information on Bahrain from 1977. The official reason? The release of such information would 'prejudice' Bahrain's relationship with the UK. The reason I suspected? Most likely Britain were still desperate to sell BAE Systems’ Eurofighters to Bahrain... Читать дальше...
Just when you thought there wasn’t quite enough nudity in Game of Thrones, George RR Martin has given his blessing to a burlesque version of the HBO drama.
Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to give his first speech on mental health was an excellent one, as was that to appoint a shadow minister for mental health, Luciana Berger.
Not so very long ago it was easy to pick out the Parliamentary Labour Party’s awkward squad. Their uniform usually comprised a combination of dark-coloured slacks, tweedy green, grey or brown sports jacket (corduroy being a racier option), plus collar and tie – but nothing fancy, and strictly no cufflinks. Michael Foot, Ken Livingstone, Dennis Skinner, Bob Cryer – and, of course, Jeremy Corbyn – stood out in their dun tones as men with the requisite puritanical zeal for a socialist future.
