We Are All Connected
Musings on life and feeling good while living in an interconnected and deeply unfair world.
Ukraine on My Mind
As Russia begins its invasion of Ukraine, here are some memories of my time there and a simple plea for peace and collective effort to end the crisis.
The American Way: Stories of Invasion
This new short story collection by Comma Press focuses on what the American Way looks like to those at the sharp end of US aggression around the world.
Inside the Syrian Conflict With Jonathan Littell
Homs is one of those places that, like Aleppo and Kandahar and Mosul, has become a byword for suffering. For years it appeared on the nightly news with images of corpses, rubble, wailing widows and intrepid reporters ducking as a…
Ten years ago: Why I Protest
This post is part of a series of stories and articles I wrote exactly ten years ago, on this day in 2003. Here I talk about my reasons for protesting against the Iraq war, which had just started at that…
“An Artist of the Floating World” by Kazuo Ishiguro
An elderly, celebrated artist, Masuji Ono, is living in retirement in Japan just after the end of World War Two. His daughter is having trouble in her marriage negotiations for reasons he can’t understand: gradually he realises it’s because he…
“A Pale View of Hills” by Kazuo Ishiguro
Most of this novel is memory: a woman thinking about her daughter’s suicide and remembering an earlier summer in post-War Nagasaki. Almost nothing happens in the present day. The whole story of A Pale View of Hills takes place in…
Johann Hari – How we fuel Africa’s bloodiest war
The deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe is starting again – and you are almost certainly carrying a blood-soaked chunk of the slaughter in your pocket. When we glance at the holocaust in Congo, with 5.4 million dead,…
“Afterwards” by Rachel Seiffert
The style of writing is very conversational. No beauty, not even many full sentences. The sort of writing with not many verbs. Just reportage,and not always very grammatical, like you were hearing someone tell you it on the phone. That…