Culture

Culture: The Drug Debate

But Russell Brand can’t seem to open his mouth without causing controversy, and this recent speech was no exception. Journalist Peter Hitchens responded by saying that the government had “abandoned many years ago” any real attempt to stop the usage of cannabis and certain Class A drugs.

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Getting Emotional

I want to start by telling you a story. It’s a very short and rather odd story, but it’s one that says a lot about quite a lot of things. One of these things is the power of your emotions. Another is the bizarre antics that postgraduate scientists get up to with their research grants, […]

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Hobbit -v- Hobbit

In this time of economic crisis everyone has been hit hard; families, single parents, civil servants, carers…the list goes on. But whilst we have had to contend with whatever ‘money saving’ scheme the government throws at us, whether it be public spending cuts or tax increases, spare a thought for small business owners; you may […]

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Traitors In The Digital Revolution

“This reproduction is displayed at 102ppi with only a million colours. It will give you some idea of what Gary Hume does, but it’s bollocks compared to the original”

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In which I say ‘coloured’

Lately I’ve taken to reading the London Gazette. There’s not a lot in it to like, really. It’s not what you’d call a riveting read. You get a sense of what it’s like from how it describes itself. ‘A modern, efficient way to disseminate and record official, regulatory and legal information’ is what the blurb […]

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If Travel Broadens the Mind…

Travel, they say, broadens the mind. Adds perspective. Opens up the outlook and so on. Makes you sophisticated and cosmopolitan. If you’ve been nowhere other than where you’re from, except on holiday; if you’ve lived in no place other than the place you know, what does that make you? What is the word for it? […]

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Vampires in fiction: A Brief History

Vampire fiction has changed a great deal in the past 200 years; from the classics to the modern day phenomenon Twilight, the vampire has been transformed since the rise of Dracula. But how has it changed, and why? It was Bram Stoker’s Dracula that really marked the beginning of popular vampire fiction and gave […]

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An Atheist’s Guide to Lucky Pigs

I am reminded of a story about the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr, who was visited at his home in Tisvilde, near Copenhagen, by an American scientist. They had just entered Bohr’s study when the American notice a ‘lucky’ horse-shoe nailed above the door, open-side upwards in the correct and approved manner, so that the luck […]

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In A Perfect World It Would Be Spiders For Lunch

Why being irrational saves us from a life of Bush-Tucker Trials Why Not Eat Insects? Not my question, by the way, but the title of a book. It was a book first published in the 1880s by a man by the name of Vincent M Holt, and it’s not been out of print since. In […]

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Around The Cuts In 8 Plays: Theatre Uncut Reviewed

Jack Thorne’s darkly satirical “Whiff Whaff” really brings home what happens when you simply accommodate these cuts.

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