The media generated fanfare surrounding Super Tuesday is over. The candidates, no doubt, have retreated to their hotel bedrooms, have taken off sweat stained shirts, hung up media friendly ties, washed off pancake makeup and now lay in bed, asleep. This may be the one time that they are disconnected from the demands of ambition. [...]

It’s usually at about this time of year that I become particularly sentimental and my dreams are filled with images of my place of origin. I catch myself awaking with a start in the middle of the night and then feel disappointed that I’m in my bed in England as opposed to where I rest [...]

Last night, I had one of the most horrific nightmares I’ve ever experienced. I dreamed I was in some sort of a control room in which earnest looking operators tended to flickering computer terminals. Beyond them lay a panoramic window which overlooked an open landscape which was mostly sand, interspersed with a few trees. Suddenly, [...]

A lengthy but illuminating exposition of Zizek’s latest batch of ideas: Watch this video on YouTube Embedded with WP YouTube Lyte.

Perhaps one of the funniest yet most obscure Monty Python sketches portrayed a meeting of senior British Civil Servants. John Cleese entered and spouted off a great deal of bureaucratic gibberish, which was then translated by his colleagues into a simple problem: the government needed something new to tax. Terry Jones then said, “…most things [...]

The Beijing Olympics have ended just as flamboyantly as they began. I watched the Closing Ceremonies with interest and a tinge of sadness: after all, the Games have provided the bulk of my entertainment for the past two weeks, and the success of the British athletes has provided me with a timely set of “pick [...]

The Games of the Paranoid Olympiad continue; however the air of unrelenting terror is only getting worse. By now, the story of how Liu Xiang, the hurdler, pulled out of the 110m race is well known; what has been less well described is how far he pushed himself before he realised he couldn’t do it. [...]

My first introduction to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia took place in a Moscow restaurant in 1994. I, along with a group of students, were taken there by our hosts to experience the delights of Georgian cuisine and wine. The alcohol flowed freely, course after course was brought to the table. Georgian music played [...]

Some movies are not intended to be high art. Before the invention of television, this was often the case: the thirties, forties and fifties were littered with throwaway films with forgettable characters and laughable story lines. The most extreme examples were the movies that were made to work with the traditional red lens / blue [...]