Politics – MindReadings

Conan Doyle’s Imaginary World & Empire

July 23, 2025History, Literature, PoliticsLeave a Comment

Empire is pivotal to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holme’s stories. India, South Africa, the Andaman Islands, Sierra Leone and of course Australia and New Zealand form a substantial part of his imaginary landscape. This is true, right from the beginning. In A Study in Scarlet, we are introduced to Dr Watson who took his degree of Doctor of Medicine from University of London in 1878. He joined the Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon and was stationed with his regiment in India as the second Afghan war broke out. He arrived In Bombay and then Candahar (sic). He served in Maiwand and was invalided out after being struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet. He was removed by packhorse to safety and landed in Peshawar where he was further struck down by dysentery.

The Terror

May 11, 2025Politics1 Comment

The Terror is already here with us and it is in plain sight, yet there’s an absence of any regard to it. Perhaps, because the current targets are by characteristics, not ‘one of us’, but minorities, and Other.

Madness in the Centre

April 15, 2025Drama, History, Literature, PoliticsLeave a Comment

Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin is a powerful and bleak novel set in Nazi Germany during World War II. It is based on a real Gestapo case file, and explores individual resistance in a totalitarian regime, focusing on the quiet rebellion of an ordinary couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, in Berlin.

Pericles’ Athens

March 2, 2025History, Literature, PoliticsLeave a Comment

'Let me say that our system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbours. It is more a case of our being a model for others […] Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty'.

FRONT DOORS

July 11, 2022Literature, Politics2 Comments

No 10 Downing Street is probably the most famous front door in the world. It is different from the other centres of power because it has the appearance of an unassuming, ordinary front door on an ordinary street. So, it’s not the White House, nor is it the Kremlin. The doorway could be the doorway…

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The Unmentionable Odour of Death

April 7, 2022History, Literature, Poetry, Politics4 Comments

In his poem ‘September 1, 1939’ WH Auden (1907-1973) referred to the ‘unmentionable odour of death’. That was at the outbreak of the 2nd World War. But now we are into the second month of Putin’s war against Ukraine and the revelations from Bucha recalls Auden’s line, but sadly, even if the odour of death is unmentionable, we can well imagine it, all that way, away from the actual grim and unspeakable horror that is Bucha.

For the Sake of God, Go!

February 5, 2022History, Literature, Politics2 Comments

In Philippic II, Cicero(106 -43 BC) wrote a rebuttal to Mark Anthony’s scurrilous attack on him. This was not the Shakespearean Mark Anthony but the real-life historical Marcus Antonius, debauched, lascivious, drunkard Marcus Antonius. The Marcus Antonius who was unfit for office.

Victorian Lagos

April 30, 2021April 30, 2021History, Literature, Politics4 Comments

There are vestiges of Victorian Lagos in Sefi Atta’s novels. Vestiges in the sense that these aspects of Victorian Lagos are quiescent and invisible, somewhat like the appendix, that is until inflamed. In The Bead Collector we have Regina Hernandes and Eugenia Hernandes both Aguda, Lagos Brazilian Catholics. Our heroine, Remi Lawal’s visit to Eugenia’s house is…

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Foul Dust

October 25, 2020History, Politics8 Comments

This brings me to the recent act of terrorism enacted by the Nigerian State, when it deliberately murdered, in cold blood, its own citizens who were protesting peacefully and duly, against police brutality. As if this act was not gross enough, the purported President, demonstrated both by his delayed response and his tone-deaf speech, that he and his other accomplices, were no more than an occupying force: detached, alien in spirit, and without moral compass.