Brought to popular western culture in the contemporary film Eastern Promises directed by David Cronenberg, and now on display at the Saatchi Gallery in the post-Soviet portraits of Sergei Vasiliev, the tattoo code language of criminals in the USSR had its roots far earlier, in Stalin’s Russia, amongst the thieves-in-law (vory v zakonye) – the …
As a postgraduate student of Russian literature at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies in 1995, I will never forget my first encounter with Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, a staggering work that powerfully, and methodically, documents the vast network of forced labour camps that existed throughout the former Soviet Union. What …
Alex Gibney’s new documentary, Maxima Mea Culpa, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, casts a critical eye on the issue of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and most striking is the film’s expose of how this abuse was, and still is, covered up not by low and middle ranking priests …
We have all done it, set down eagerly to read a new book and come away disappointed after the first few pages. It is not easy to create a gripping tale, but when an author gets it right, the result is priceless. This got me thinking about the characteristics that are actually found in a …
“I was recommended to read this book by a friend and I can honestly say I couldn’t put it down. It’s a wonderful story with two wonderful characters. It really gave me food for thought as I certainly related to the New York Don. It’s very visual and I really felt like I was there …
“Don Don is a perfect entertaining book for me, spirituality and fiction. The book makes sense in many ways: the characters, Buddhism, Thai lives etc. Nick is very clever in the way he put things together. It could be a serious book: about life and death, and believers. But I have found myself laughing, and …
“Just finished Don Don… finished it in less than 8 hours… very interesting and enlightening… still thinking of the characters.. the author has used a very explicit language that I find honest and interesting. I also really liked the plethora of spiritual information contained in the book. The whole concept of soul merging with the …
“Borrowed your book Don Don from the library yesterday…started reading it some ten minutes back…had to find you out fast and tell you that I had never read a book as sharp as this.. felt like “straight from the heart-straight into the book-straight into the heart”…had never been this glad about a book…made me feel …
To label the teenager Daniel Bartlam “evil”, as the Daily Mirror does this morning, is a gross oversimplification, not least because implicit in this label is the idea that he is somehow not human, something other, an abomination. He is none of these. Rather he is all too human – an isolated, troubled and destructive …
Jason Russell’s KONY 2012 film is indeed very powerful, playing perfectly to an idealistic youth with its simplistic, gung-ho Hollywood sentiment: that human evil can be eradicated and the world finally made good if only Joseph Kony, the Ugandan warlord, is at last captured and punished. And this youth, by virtue of their youth – …