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Revellers dance, march and sing through the tear gas at Sicilian anti-G7, anti-Trump protest

The party ended the way these things tend to: with the police rocking up and telling everyone to go home. Of course, the police were at the anti-G7 march in Giardini Naxos, Sicily, before the party had even begun, and

On the eve of the G7, protesters and security forces square off under an uneasy Sicilian sun

At first glance, Giardini Naxos, Sicily, doesn’t appear to be on the brink of anti-globalist chaos. Families gallivant on the beach. Men with torsos the colour of burnt umber play volleyball nearby. Tourists debate the relative merits of dinner and

On Margate sands: Farage, Dreamland, and the UKIP-ification of the Tories

I am standing in a Victorian-era promenade shelter in Margate, a two-hour train ride from London in the district of Thanet in north-eastern Kent, looking out over the grey-green water, hugging my winter coat around me, and trying to imagine

“My religious convictions do not allow me to vote”: French Muslims on Le Pen, extremism, and today’s historic election

In the courtyard of the Grand Mosque of Paris, where the emerald green tiles of its dormant fountains dry quickly after the afternoon rain, Dalil Boubakeur is helped by his assistant to the garden’s sunken war memorial. He lays a

‘Carnivalesque’ by Neil Jordan

It was the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin who first coined the title of Neil Jordan’s new novel, Carnivalesque, a term he used to define a kind of literature that subverts the dominant styles and hierarchies of its time by means of

Stranger than fiction: Donald Trump and ‘The Plot Against America’

No author of speculative fiction wants to be proven right. To be proven right in the spec-fic game is to see the worst come to pass. No, speculative fiction is written as a warning, and the crow of “I told

Hakawati

Hakawati

Criticism , Theatre Jan 16, 2017

Some of my most memorable meals have been enjoyed in the Middle East. I shared iftar with a Palestinian family in Ramallah on the West Bank, and was an unlikely guest at a Kurdish wedding in the Turkish city of

Home Country

Home Country

Criticism , Theatre Jan 15, 2017

Consisting of three short plays (each staged in parts), with a couple of musical interludes and a meal thrown in for good measure, Urban Theatre Projects’ Home Country is at once place- and site-specific. The place in question is Blacktown,