Iraq history
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“The English have for centuries been a mystery to the peoples of other countries, and failure to solve this mystery has led the stranger to use all sorts of epithets.” In June 1945 this sentence began the dictation passage in an exam paper for the Certificate in Proficiency in English. Around then my father, a…
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I heard that the blues musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in return for his guitar-playing genius, that Paganini was the devil’s violinist and the devil himself is a fiddle player. That was reported as fact to a folklore researcher and quoted in his article The Devil and the…
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Apologies, firstly, to any artists reading this who know what I’m talking about more than I do. This August I saw two exhibitions, three days and five hundred years apart, that made me feel I have finally learned something quite profound about visual art. On Tuesday I went to see Breathing Colour at the Design…
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Amulets are still everywhere. You might have noticed them in cabs dangling from rear mirrors, behind the serving counter in a takeaway, and worn as necklaces or rings. They go back thousands of years. I didn’t know what an amulet was until I read Edith Nesbit’s The story of the amulet, and even then I…
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The final liberation of Mosul from IS is being regularly announced now and one of these days it will actually be true. Three years ago IS used the ancient and highly symbolic al-Nuri mosque to declare its so-called caliphate. A few days ago they blew up the mosque, before it could be recaptured, and have…
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