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Press Button B

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Terry Eagleton will have no truck with the modern world and its noise and its gadgets and its silly babbling. Fair play to him.
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C’est la meme chose

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Some non-Anglo-Saxon cultures, and particularly the French, seem prone to national panic in the face of la globalisation. But rumours and fears of cultural extinction are greatly exaggerated.
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The Orwell Prize

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The prestigious British prize has announced its annual winners in the categories of journalism and political writing, together with a special prize for foreign correspondent the late Marie Colvin, who died in Syria.
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Saloon Bar Blues

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Philip Larkin is still among Britain’s most read poets, which must testify to a certain appetite for gloom. Alan Bennett however finds it is sometimes all a little too much.
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1-9 of 699 results

  • Spring colours in Zaporizhia

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    • 25 June 2026

    Rosemary Jenkinson writes: On April 16th, 2026 at 3 am I’m on the sleeper train to Zaporizhia in southeastern Ukraine when there is a loud rap on our four-berth compartment door.
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  • Elites and / or / versus Democracy

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    • 23 June 2026

    Michael Laver writes: Andy Burnham’s resounding defeat of the upstart right-wing Reform Party in the recent Makerfield byelection throws some light on the seemingly inexorable decline of ‘legacy’ parties on the centre right and centre left.
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  • The living and the dead

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    • 16 June 2026

    Mike Gogan writes on Bloomsday: ‘Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.’ This is one of quite a few yeses in the last paragraphs of ‘The Dead’, the final short story in ‘Dubliners’ by James Joyce. In ‘Ulysses’, which was written after, the last word of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy faintly echoes this, ‘Yes’.
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  • Selling one’s soul and saving it

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    • 1 June 2026

    Raymond Geuss writes: Marx is generally considered to be a thinker who had little time for the spiritual dimension of human life. This is correct if the spiritual life is understood as depending on reference to theological or transhuman entities or to metaphysical properties.
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  • Michael D’s Memory

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    • 1 June 2026

    Liam Kennedy writes: Sociologists, unlike historians, have long memories. My evidence for this – historians like evidence – is a sample of one, the former president of Ireland, Michael D Higgins.
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  • For the Little People

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    • 29 April 2026

    Enda O’Doherty writes: Populists claim they represent the views of ‘ordinary people’, ignored by out-of-touch, ‘cosmopolitan’ political elites. But their methods of communicating with this segment of society are laden with calculation and condescension.
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  • Fleeing the Russian State

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    • 29 April 2026

    Alexander Obolonsky writes: Russia has something positive to present – both to itself and to the world. Alongside the dominant culture of subjugation, an alternative counter-culture of resistance has always existed and survived, even in the darkest times.
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  • Dropping the mask

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    • 29 April 2026

    Andy Storey writes: the old, better-managed order mourned by the writers in Foreign Affairs was no less violent and exploitative than Trump’s grotesque carnival of hustle and hubris.
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  • Reasoning Animals

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    • 29 April 2026

    Stephen O’Neill writes: What is stopping a conversation about a United Ireland which doesn’t knowingly inhabit the same structures that it seeks to replace, or repeat the same cliches and reinscribe the same privileges that those structures have perpetuated?
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