When Marlon Brando told his father, Marlon Snr., he was going to make his first movie the older man told his son: ‘Take a look in the mirror, and tell me who’s going to want to look at your ugly mug on the screen.’ Brando’s relationship with his father, and […]

In America, the biggest beast of capitalism, they call May 1st ‘Labor Day’. In South Africa, it’s ‘Workers Day’. The Germans call it ‘Arbeiterstag’. While here in Britain it’s known, blandly, as ‘May Day Bank Holiday’. It wasn’t that long ago that an earlier Tory government – it could have […]

It began with a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles that appeared in the New York Sun newspaper in 1948. Malcolm Johnson was the journalist determined to expose the corruption, graft and racketeering in his seminal work – ‘Crime on the Waterfront’. It was hard going, especially when he came up against […]

It wasn’t the first time ‘realism’ hit the cinema screens. However, ‘On the Waterfront’ (1954) was the first major commercial and critical breakthrough of its kind. The very term – ‘social realism’ – was first coined in the fledgling Soviet Union, after the 1917 Russian Revolution, to describe such films as ‘October’, ‘Battleship […]

By the skin of my teeth, I’ve just avoided redundancy for the third time in two years. Welcome to the wonderful world of work! Time was, back before we had our first female prime minister – no names mentioned –  you really could finish one job on a Friday and start a […]

Thatcher is dead. But ‘Thatcherism’ is very much alive. It’s embodied, not only in our present CONDEM coalition government as they hand out devastating cuts while further enriching the wealthy, but in the very heart of our body politic. In death, as in her lifetime, Margaret Thatcher has managed to divide the […]

If our media were to be believed you’d think young people were either too complacent, lazy, self-obsessed, apolitical or too cowed to do anything about the government cuts raining down on us all. You could be forgiven for thinking that students have been doing nothing since the December 9, 2010 […]

It was the battle that broke the back of the Nazi juggernaut sent hurtling East against the Soviet Union. After Stalingrad, Hitler’s armies were never again able to fully recover. The Third Reich was on the road to ruin. Seventy years ago, alongside the British and Commonwealth forces’ victory over Rommel’s Afrika […]