Category: Articles

• October 18, 2017

  Getting Orwell wrong

   [Photo of  Julian Barnes © Alan Edwards]     [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2017.]   In the New York Review of Books not long ago, the well-known British author Julian Barnes ran his eye over some compilations of George Orwell’s work. Thinking about the school where a young Orwell was sent to…
• September 9, 2017

  Tragedy in Turkey

   [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, September 2017.]   Where to begin when we look at Turkey? Here is a part of the world with so much culture and history in its favour but in the last couple of years it has become somewhere you would not choose to live and you would even…
• July 10, 2017

  The way we are

  [This article was first published in the 10th Anniversary edition of Catalonia Today, June 2014.]    I was a reader of Catalonia Today before I was a writer for Catalonia Today. My first memory of it (at that time published as a weekly newspaper) was being impressed by (now Editor) Marcela Topor’s wonderful interview with…
• July 4, 2017

  Real red: Corbyn and Goytisolo

    [This article was first published under the title "The rallying of the left" in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2017.]   Elections can be strange events. The British one last month produced a mixture of results but one thing it showed was that a genuinely democratic socialist government there is a distinct possibility after the…
• June 10, 2017

  The quiet one

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2017.]       There he is. Sitting along the side of the class, with his head down. He could be a child or an adult — and certainly female too — but today at least this introvert has very little to say for himself.…
• May 19, 2017

  Democracy and other duds

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2017.]   At a time when the European Union appears to be slowly falling apart, its highest court was fixated on whether a woman at one workplace in Belgium should be allowed to wear material covering her head. As a staunch non-believer in religion, I…
• April 8, 2017

  The words we use

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2017.] Good. Bad. These are two words that have come back into public language recently. Unfortunately, they are words which express the extremes of a moral spectrum and have been returned to politics via the snarling mouth of US liar-in-chief Donald Trump.   I have…
• March 11, 2017

  The Trump show

  [This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2017.]     There is really only one news story over the last months: the start of Donald Trump’s regime.   Before the end of last year I said on Matthew Tree’s TV discussion program that one of the main reasons Trump was elected was…
• February 28, 2017

  Early doors day

  (This poem was first published in Burrow here at Old Water Rat’s Publishing ) soft lines of fog trees not the desert but quiet like the desert we look at the stars to see what we come from body not yet the enemy light slowly befriends you
• February 6, 2017

  “The role of culture in Europe’s crisis.” (My translation.)

    Below is my translation of *Marcelo Expósito’s contribution to the session on "Diplomazia Culturale dell’UE", as part of the meeting: “How Can We Govern Europe?” held at the Camera Dei Deputati, Rome, November 18, 2016.   (*Marcelo Expósito is a Deputy for Barcelona from En Comú Podem and is the Third Secretary of the…