Reviews of Habibi Funk 031, Kayatibu, and The Good Ones
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‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’
The great English poet JOHN KEATS died 200 years ago and his radical understanding of aesthetics reaches far into the future, writes Jenny Farrell
(L to R) John_Keats sculpture by Vincent Gray in Chichester and the poet's former home in Hampstead, now the Keats House museum
[(L to R) Sidpickle and Alphauser/Creative Commons]
SIMON DUFF relishes the cross contamination of Damien Hirst’s greatest hits by street artists from France and the US
In view of the grooming gangs inquiry, SIMON PARSONS feels the relevance of this powerful examination of trauma suffered at Medomsley Youth Detention Centre
JOHN GREEN doubts the motivations of a US war photographer who never questions why, or for whom, she is producing images of imperialist conflict
MARIA DUARTE reviews Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Hedda, The Mastermind, and Regretting You
TONY CONWAY welcomes a thrilling and concise history of Hope not Hate, that is also a manual full of tactical advice
PAUL DONOVAN welcomes an inspiring account of living with deafness that has important lessons for the treatment of deaf people in today’s UK
ACCORDING to George Bernard Shaw, John Keats “achieved the very curious feat of writing a poem of which it may be said that if Karl Marx can be imagined writing a poem instead of a treatise on Capital, he would have written Isabella.”
Shaw’s view clashes with that of most mainstream critics, who deny Keats any political thought and declare him a worshipper of some unspecified “beauty.” But the 200th anniversary of Keats’s death on February 23 at the age of only 25 is an opportunity to reclaim the reputation of this revolutionary romantic.
In his time, the implications of the English and then the American and French revolutions, heralding the arrival of capitalist society in Europe and elsewhere, were understood and feared by conservative governments across Europe.
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A pamphlet by British Latinx poet Patrick Romero McCafferty, poetry by Anglo-Argentinian Miguel Cullen, and a book of conjuring poems by Mexican Pedro Serrano
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