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 model, currently [...]

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 response [...]

Economically there is in the greatest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930’s, petrol prices are soaring and workers are being laid off from even the largest of corporations. In terms of foreign policy, its citizens are mocked and abhorred, something that I have personally experienced as an American studying in England. Being from [...]

Greek film Politiki Kouzina, which translates into English as ‘Cuisine of the City’, the City being Constantinople, seems a fitting point of departure for looking at the political function of food. As we learn through the protagonist’s grandfather, grocer Vassilis, spices played a huge part in the culinary lives of the Greek community that lived [...]

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 emo’ scuzzed [...]

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, education [...]

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 than [...]

For over a year now, George Bush has found himself hovering between 30% and 40% in approval ratings. This makes him one of the most deeply unpopular presidents the United States has ever seen, with the war in Iraq and the potential economic crash key to his downfall. It is no surprise then that the [...]

In all walks of life, apathy tends to occur when we feel we have no direction over a situation, when we feel that any attempt to exert our control will be met with defeat. Political apathy is no different. The standard channels of political participation in this country are through general elections and party membership, [...]

We hear a lot about how a rising tide of unreason is threatening to sweep away the world of secular modernity. If you have read anything by Richard Dawkins you’ll probably be familiar with the theme. Fundamentalist Christians and Muslims can’t wait to do away with all that human rights stuff and start stoning people who [...]