• A photograph of a drawing of a crowd watching a theatrical performance inside a nineteenth-century style theatre hall

Photograph of Jean-Luc Nancy

OLR 40th Anniversary – Jean-Luc Nancy

In 1963, Jean-Luc Nancy tackled the subject of generational silence in his article ‘A Certain Silence’ (republished in OLR in 2005). Nancy, a well-known French philosophy and writer, wrote ‘A Certain Silence’ only a year after he graduated in Philosophy…

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817-2017

By Robert Morrison An extract from Romanticism, Volume 23.3, October 2017 1817 was a remarkable year for British Romanticism John Keats published his first volume of Poems. Thomas Moore produced Lalla Rookh, Percy Shelley Laon and Cythna, Felicia Hemans Modern…

100 Years Since the Russian Revolution

Looking Back at the Russian Revolution 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which occurred in March and November (Gregorian calendar) in 1917. The pair of revolutions saw the disassembly of the Tsarist autocracy in favour of the…

Hamish Henderson

Hamish Henderson and our Historical Moment

What’s the artist for in modern Scotland? Curating our accumulated history? Envisioning our possible and impossible futures? Diagnosing the ills of our present and prescribing treatment for the body politic? Showing us who we are, or who we ought to…

The CounterText Interview: Judith Butler

CounterText Volume 3.2 (August 2017) is a special issue entitled The Poetic, and contains a contains a wide-ranging interview with Judith Butler conducted by Aaron Aquilina (Lancaster) and Kurt Borg (Staffordshire). The following remarks, taken from near the end of…

OLR 40th Anniversary – Maurice Blanchot

Marcel Proust once said, “Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” Friendship, and the role it plays in life, is an interesting and varied topic explored…

Viking Law and Order

Viking Law and Order

My new book, Viking Law and Order, paints a rather different picture of Viking Age society from the one we are used to. We often hear discussions of violent raids and systematic pillaging by warriors arriving in long ships. It…