John Baker’s Blog

It wasn’t an everyday event. Bodies weren’t. Altogether, not in this part of the country. You could be a serving officer for your whole life and not come into contact with a body. Maybe in London, Manchester, Birmingham, big cities. In those places you would have to deal with bodies, still not every day, but [...]

Sam Smith on Undernews has some pertinent observations about the so-called struggle against terrorism:
The journalist Bernard Fall noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the [...]

In my copy of Lorca’s Poet in New York -
I was on the terrace, wrestling with the moon.
Swarms of windows riddled one of the night’s thighs.
Placid sky-cattle drank from my eyes
and the breezes on long oars
struck the ashen store windows on Broadway.
- there is a translation, by Christopher Maurer, of a lecture which the poet [...]