With money as the feature, the latest issue of the Zahir is out now, go to the archive page at the top for full technicolour.
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Looking to the Middle East, Peter ‘Hulk’ Hagen examines the role of money as a political instrument. On the 7th June, 1981, eight Israeli F-16s roared over the Iraqi desert en route to the site of Osirak Nuclear Materials Testing Reactor. They were not there to film Top Gun. Operation Opera was a controversial...
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Benjamin T. Schonewald explores the effect of the recession on voting Everyone is learning to loathe the news. Every day, there’s a new scare-story or scandal, and increasingly these terrible tales are centred around the murky and oft-misunderstood world of finance. I can’t pretend to know much more than anyone else about the recession,...
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James MacDougald argues that, unlike the proverbial omelette, combating the BNP should not involve breaking any eggs This month, the British National Party beat their own electoral record by winning seats in two European parliamentary constituencies. So, naturally, everyone’s making a big fuss. It goes without saying that holocaust denial is unpalatable, that repatriation...
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Huw Halstead ponders contemporary role models. We live in a society that loves its role models, almost as much as it loves to argue about them. We talk about how Liverpool Football Club’s captain Steven Gerrard has failed in his duty as a role model when he’s caught assaulting people in a nightclub. Our...
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Huw Halstead asks: are all female protagonists in video games designed to be hot? The likes of Lara Croft from Tomb Raider and the school-uniform-clad Dead or Alive girls have seen their sexuality specifically employed to sell video games. Lara Croft has become such a sexual franchise that publisher Eidos employs a full time...
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Prompting public sector strikes in France, Emily Labram investigates Sarkozy’s difficult relationship with La Princess de Cleves. If Gordon Brown scorned Milton’s Paradise Lost, how indignant would you feel? Would you take to the streets, banners waving, and blockade Heslington Hall? Call it classic French over-reaction if you will, but this was exactly the...
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Rhiannon Williams critiques the world of fantastic and dubious film adaptations. When I first heard of plans to turn Audrey Niffennegger’s 2004 novel The Time Traveller’s Wife into a blockbuster movie, my heart sank. To see a truly original work of heartbreaking modern fiction reduced to a ‘romantic drama’ on the imdb website depressed...
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Laura Ward Nokes observes a discourse on why we read and write. You are sitting on a train. The destination is irrelevant; the train journey is the important thing. It is a long one. You have triumphantly grabbed the prize trophy of train travel: a forward facing window seat at a communal table. Smug...
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Frederick Botham probes into the turbulence of the creative mind. Monday 11th February 1963 represents a day of unfulfilled engagements for those close to Sylvia Plath. The table reservation for lunch with her publisher would have to be cancelled. The nurse that was scheduled to arrive at her house on Fitzroy Road at 9...
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