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The Complete Scottish Sketches of R. B. Cunninghame Graham
Read more: The Complete Scottish Sketches of R. B. Cunninghame GrahamCunninghame Graham's great-grandnephew reveals his favourite sketch of the celebrated Scottish writer
Warwick Ball on the cultural diversity of Afghanistan
It is a pleasure to see the launch of the first issue of Afghanistan, a journal to showcase the country’s exceptional cultural diversity. It is the first scholarly journal devoted to the country since the demise of Afghan Studies in…
Utopia: A round-table discussion
Sir Thomas More (1477 – 1535) was the first person to write of a ‘utopia’, a word used to describe a perfect imaginary world. The term was first published in 1516, and became the short title of his book about an…
The Douglass family and the roots of activism and social justice
By Celeste-Marie Bernier and Andrew Taylor Frederick Douglass. Just the name alone is enough to inspire us to think of a life lived in activism and an unceasing fight for social justice. But there are other names in the life…
Reading the Times: Temporality and History in Twentieth-Century Fiction
By Randall Stevenson On Bastille Day, 2000, why did 3 million people sit down to a picnic lunch along a line carefully set out across the whole of France, from north to south? Mostly, to remember and celebrate the Paris…
7 things you should know about the destruction of graves in the Islamic world
By Ondrej Beranek and Pavel Tupek 1) Over the past years and decades, various parts of the Islamic world – from Iraq, Syria, Mali and Tunisia, to Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Bangladesh – have faced virulent attacks targeting…
The Qur’an and the Just Society
I was standing in a library aisle in the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, my neck craning to read titles dropping vertically down the spines of books. A familiar experience for many students, even if it is being…
John Ray and Archives of Natural History
English naturalist John Ray was born in November 1627. Generally regarded as one of the earliest English parson-naturalists, he is credited as “the originator of the criterion of common parentage for conspecificity”. Ray wrote widely on botany, natural theology, taxonomy…
Children’s Gothic Fiction – Top 10 Must Reads
By Dr Chloé Germaine Buckley While researching my forthcoming book, Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic, I have read a lot of scary stories written for children and young adults. Although the Gothic has always been part of children’s literature, it has exploded in…
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…