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A little over a week ago, as I was preparing for bed, I heard through the grapevine that there had been an explosion in Turin, Italy, where fans of Juventus FC had been watching their team play Real Madrid on
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
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
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
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
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
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
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