Two weeks have passed here in Berlin since the city more or less shut down. As with other places, there were warning signs. People wearing face masks in the supermarket. Bus drivers locking the front door as they were no longer handling coins. My son’s hands starting to peel from constant washing at school. And […]

In 1999, the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs, known for, amongst other things, pushing a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City (Paradox of Praxis 1, 1997), took a walk across Hyde Park in London. The walk, memorialised only in a simple, unembellished photograph of an aerial view of the park, he titled ‘Pebble Walk’, christening […]

Recently I read an interview with the English writer, Hilary Mantel, which got me thinking about the role of the author in writing historical fiction. Mantel is a rigorous researcher (which, being a researcher myself, I admire) and insists on the novelist’s duty to stick to the facts, as they’re set out in the history […]

Let us take it that the bridge is built and crossed, that we can put it out of our mind. We have left behind the territory in which we were. We are in the far territory; where we want to be. – J.M. Coetzee Every time we read, we cross a bridge to another territory. […]