A word in your ear: An Interview with Don Paterson
Don Paterson has written some of the most brilliant poems of the past twenty years, so it is with a deal of persistence that I edge the dictaphone closer and closer to him across the table. He speaks very quietly, and these are not cheap words. Winner of the 2009 Forward Poetry Prize for his [&helli
Kim Jong-il’s Cinema Club
On 26th December, 2010, North Korean state television showed Bend It Like Beckham. This tale of culture clashes in London ladies’ football team starring Keira Knightley had the dubious honour of being the first Western film to be shown anywhere in the notoriously secretive state. And what an odd c
All Quiet on the African Front: A troubling blind spot in the British press
Ask somebody what they know about the Second Congo War and you will receive one of two responses. Either there will be a look of blankness accompanied by a comment like “I didn’t even know there was a first Congo War”, or, the respondent’s eyes will drift as they struggle to gather vague fra
Ice Cream and Communism: The Sweet Side Effects of the Cuban Revolution
An immense ice-cream parlour stands on a leafy street in Havana, Cuba, like a towering UFO. Reputedly over 30,000 customers visit every day to devour scoops of Coppelia ice cream, Cuba’s government-subsidised snack of choice. The Havana branch of Coppelia lies in the art deco time warp of Vedado,
Tea With A Stranger (Ep 4)
The ISIS interviews Oxford’s strangers over a cup of tea.
A Leap of Faith: Don Justo’s Self-Made Cathedral
Gusto Gallego Martínez rarely sits. A former monk at Trappist order Santa María de Huerta, the eighty-six year old Don Justo, as he is known, has spent his life building, virtually unaided, the unfinished Catedral de la Fe – the Cathedral of faith – which looms brilliantly and bizarrely over t
The ISIS Short Essay Competition: ‘If this was the last piece of paper in the world, what would you write on it?’
“Ask the Microvac,” wailed Jerrodette I. “Ask him how to turn the stars on again.” (The Last Question, Isaac Asimov) There are more than fifty-five thousand museums in the world today. New York alone has more than eighty of them. Each year, millions of people flock to these spaces, populated
The ISIS Short Essay Competition: “O tell me the truth about love” (W.H. Auden).
Love cannot be just another Holocaust story! Or so my readers will surely exclaim in disbelief when I reveal that I wear love on my index finger. The ring is a symbol, I suppose, a small token of remembrance; it is a silver band which encloses a Star of David, purchased in the Jewish quarter [&helli
Descartes
Descartes thought the sky was made of spirals, spangled whirlwind scrawls, a tide of starlight, oily brushstrokes crowding in the midnight, currents sweeping past the moon. His rival, a Mr Newton, won; the Lumières jeered, and though the sciences were an art those days, the pictures Descartes saw w