Category Archives: Uncategorized

A member of the Israeli group ‘Breaking the Silence’ has published accounts of Israeli soldiers being authorized by their commanders to carry out revenge attacks against civilians in the Gaza Strip “to enable the soldiers to take out their frustrations and pain at losing their fellow soldiers”.

Parents grieving the loss of their children at the attack on a UN School on Monday

Eran Efrati reports, “Soldiers in two different units inside Gaza leaked information about the murdering of Palestinians by sniper fire in Shuja’eyya neighborhood as punishment for the death of soldiers in their units. After the shooting on the Israeli armored personnel carriers, which killed seven soldiers of the Golani Brigade, the Israeli army carried out a massacre in Shuja’eyya neighborhood.

“A day after the massacre, many Palestinians came to search for their relatives and their families in…

A few years after the twentieth century ended the world became terrible. The economy shit the bed, everyone lost their jobs, the government started to become evil, and all educational programing was systematically replaced by “reality” television. It was as if Orwell made a half-assed attempt to write a comedy but it ended up being our actual lives instead of a single work that permanently defamed him. This new world worked out great if you wanted to live in perpetual poverty watching idiots argue wide-eyed about nothing in particular over a staccato soundtrack between fifteen minutes of advertising. But, if you were interested in being more than a culture zombie, things were going to get rough the second you left college and entered the intellectual desert of everyday life.

The internet had become our last bastion of cultural hope but that too had begun the slow decent into repugnancy. Advertising…

Today is Tolkien Reading Day, an annual event launched in 2003 by the Tolkien Society. (The date of 25 March was chosen in honour of the fall of Sauron in the Third Age, year 3019, in Tolkien’s fiction.) The reading day promotes the use of Tolkien’s writing in schools and library groups, and is celebrated in numerous countries. To mark the occasion, we’ve put together ten of our favourite quotations from John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. The first quotation, about Beowulf, is especially timely because of the recent announcement that Tolkien’s translation of that epic poem is finally going to be published!

On Beowulf and myth: ‘The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done. Its defender…

As tomorrow (8th March) is International Women’s Day, we’ve gathered together ten of our favourite quotations from women writers. Some are wise, some are witty, some weird; all are wonderful, in our opinion. And what unites them all is that they were uttered (or written) by some of the major female figures in literature. We’d be interested to hear your favourite quotations from women writers, in the comments below – which names/quotations have we missed off?

‘Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it.’ – Hannah More

‘If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a pretty good time.’ – Edith Wharton

‘There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.’ – Sylvia Plath

‘One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.’ – Jane…