Naruhito’s Enthronement and the Question of Imperial Divinity Will Goddard takes a deeper look at Naruhito’s recent enthronement and its potentially troublesome correlations with imperial divinity. It was this very divinity that the Allies sought to dismantle after the Second World War. After Japan’s unconditional surrender in August of 1945, following the atomic bombings of […]
world war two
Commemorating the Holocaust in Budapest: Remembering Jewish lives, not deaths
The streets of Budapest, like many other European cities, are punctuated by brass plaques in the pavement. These plaques are called ‘stolpersteine’. They are ‘stumbling stones’ that you can come across purely by chance and which, placed in the street outside the last known address of a victim of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution, remember […]
Japan and ‘Kintsugi’: an art form threading not just through pottery, but society?
The craftsman washes the clay from his hands. He boils some water for tea, and reaching for a teacup knocks it off the shelf. It smashes on the floor. He cradles the broken pieces, and carefully puts them back together again with gold lacquer. He holds it up to the sun. Where there were once […]
Tintin: behind the quiff
Donning a perpetually immaculate quiff of blond hair, a pair of perfectly creased plus fours and always accompanied by his alcoholic fox terrier, Snowy, Tintin needs no introduction. The brainchild of Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi under the pen name Hergé, Tintin has pinged around the world like a human pinball, foiling the dastardly plots of […]
Review: Hacksaw Ridge
When Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan was released in 1998, it revolutionised the modern war film. It was by no means the best that the genre had to offer, but the first to convincingly capture the shattering sights and sounds of the battlefield. Spielberg launched a generation of imitators, from Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down […]