Category: ARTICLES

  • Writing Home: Arnold Bennett, Stoke and Me  – Jonathan Taylor

    Writing Home: Arnold Bennett, Stoke and Me  – Jonathan Taylor

    Jonathan Taylor “No-one ever comes to Stoke, no-one ever leaves Stoke, except for Arnold Bennett, and even he had to write about it”: when I was growing up in Stoke-on-Trent (aka the Potteries) in the 1970s and 80s, this was a saying that everyone knew. It conveyed Stoke’s insularity, its proud tradition of isolation. At…

  • David Graeber (1961-2020) – Andy Hedgecock

    David Graeber (1961-2020) – Andy Hedgecock

    Andy Hedgecock writes an appreciation of the works of David Graeber (1961-2020). A dissident writer who in Utopia of Rules tackles the factors that lead us to create and sustain rule-based systems and – in turn – considers the tendency of those systems to determine the way we use our tools and technologies.

  • The hedgehog and the goose – Shaun Belcher

    The hedgehog and the goose – Shaun Belcher

    ECOLOGICAL THEMES IN THE POETRY OF ALASDAIR MACLEAN AND WILLIAM NEILL. “At heart no flyer,  I bristle timidly when touched. When the ice comes I retreat beneath it. I choose at last hedgehogs.” Thus Alasdair Maclean ends his poem ’Hedgehogs and Geese’ in his first published book of poems ‘From the Wilderness’ which has ‘Poetry…

  • The Symphonies of Hans Werner Henze – Jonathan Taylor

    The Symphonies of Hans Werner Henze – Jonathan Taylor

    Gesamtkunstwerk in the Head: The Symphonies of Hans Werner Henze For all its claims to absolute music, the symphony has always been a hybrid – maybe even omnivorous – musical genre, constantly renewing itself by fusing with other genres and art-forms. Haydn frequently employs folk songs in his symphonies, like many composers after him; Mozart’s symphonies…