England had no Empire.
I went to the Ming Tombs on a scorching summer’s day. On the outskirts of Beijing, between the mountains of White Tiger and Red Phoenix, lay buried the 13 Emperors of the Ming Dynasty. Tomb is too humble a name, really. They are cities for the afterlife, complete with gates, walls with batt
It is bourgeois to block your ex.
There is this thing Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, his longest, most torturous (at least the first 20 pages), and certainly most arduous book to read. In it, Van and Ada, the twin protagonists, two lovers who have been together and separated for over 80 years, share this term for each others’ past flam
Dr Faustus got me thinking
What does an Oxford student director want to hear from a critic? How does that differ from an Elizabethan playwright? As I sat in the Keble O’Riley on a rainy Wednesday night, I couldn’t help but notice how the Oxford dramatic scene is really a strange apparatus. There is a kind of Fausti
Is Marxism over?
Conventional leftist wisdom has it to mock the so-called ‘End of History’. But what if all this is just a massive cope? Sure. Liberal democracy did not continue to triumph in the decades after 1989, but neither did socialism, so it was a lose-lose. Today, Marxism has more rallying
