With morbid anticipation, the UK media has awaited the death of the 100th British soldier in Afghanistan. On June 8 it happened: three soldiers from the 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment  were killed by a suicide bomber in the south of the country. Quickly, Gordon Brown responded to the grim milestone. ‘They have paid the...
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At a seminar loosely arranged around Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, I had the opportunity to discuss Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence, a direct attempt to answer Huntington, with Ibn Warraq (who wrote Why I am not a Muslim). Sen wants to make a big deal out of the Muslim emperor Akhbar of...
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Do young bands these days play to cyber-publics? This question sprung up when I was considering my time as a guitarist in a small band formed with my friends. We were called Alnegator and mostly performed and practised in York. Making music with close friends,  performing mostly in front of close friends and their...
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You may not have heard of him, but Pierre Boulez is probably the most eminent living composer in Europe, so his visit to Birmingham last Month took place with a reverence usually reserved for royalty. After hearing a concert of his music the previous evening the French-born Boulez, also a highly successful conductor, took...
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For most people who consider Belgium to be somewhat of a picturesque but tedious interlude between Calais and their final destination, making a stop on the E40 at Ghent to see the ancient altarpiece in the Saint Bavo Cathedral is less likely than the Venus de Milo learning to play guitar. If they were...
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If we pick up a book of poetry we may be allowed the hope of being emotionally stimulated or imaginatively provoked by what we find. We may well believe that a rose is in fact incredibly ‘lusty’, that the crocus lies ‘naked and shivering’, and that laurels do indeed find themselves ‘dry-tongued’. This bed...
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I suppose you could call it Psycho-criticism. Pyscho-criticism was a flash-in-the-pan. The most radical of the postmodern schools, it burnt the candle at every end and died, gasping for breath, in a small pool of its own hilarity. I invented Pyscho-criticism. At least, I was there at its inception. In sixth form history of...
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The British social ideology has publicly shifted to the right through the opinions of some media outlets and the actions of government. First, a quick trip in a journalistic TARDIS to May 16th and an article on the website of Thatcherite fanzine the Daily Mail: ‘No child is safe from the sinister cult of...
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In his article No Shangri-La (London Review of Books 24 April 2008), Slavoj Žižek argues that the western media has imposed a romanticised and rose-tinted view of Tibet on us, emphasising its spirituality and geographic beauty. In Žižek’s view, we are seldom exposed to the facts about Chinese investment in Tibet’s economic development, infrastructure,...
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Andrew Feinstein is a former ANC MP whose attempts to investigate a massive, corrupt arms deal are contained in his memoir After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey Inside the ANC, Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2007. The Zahir exclusively presents Feinstein’s unabridged opinions BAE Systems’ AGM on the 7th May was even more surreal...
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