‘I wish I could think of a positive point to leave you with. Will you take two negative points?’ Woody Allen, from his stand-up comedy routine (1964) Consider the facts: French writer Annie Ernaux has an affair with a young man, thirty years her junior (she was fifty-four, he was twenty-four), and writes about it, … Read more
Science in itself appears to me neutral, that is to say, it increases men’s power whether for good or for evil. – Bertrand Russell (from The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1914-1944 (1968), Vol. 2, Letter to W. W. Norton, 27 January, 1931). What is Science? That is about as readily answerable a question as ‘What … Read more
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. James Joyce, in ‘Nestor’, from Ulysses (1922) If there is any substitute for love, it is memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy.’ Joseph Brodsky, in ‘Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) An Obituary’, from Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986) One of the … Read more
My wrist watch stops dead shortly after we arrive in Tangier (at 21:16 – 2/6/2022, to be precise), which is symbolically appropriate. Time runs differently in Joujouka, the rural village located some 110km south of here in the Rif Mountains, for which this urbane, noisy, historically cosmopolitan port city is on this occasion serving as … Read more
In the final part of his essay on the joys and woes of being an Irish Manchester City fan, Desmond Traynor delves into psychological and emotional reasons for sustaining sporting allegiances, through thick and thin. Even if nothing in the foregoing fact-based rant convinces City-sceptics, it is not the main plank of my justification for … Read more
