‘Always historicize!'

"Fredric Jameson’s pre-eminence, over the last generation, among critics writing in English would be hard to dispute . . ." An excellent review in the London Review of Books by Benjamin Kunkel of Jameson's latest work Valences of the Dialectic and of his place in the culture. Jameson contribution is extremely stimulating, we hope this piece will stir more people to read and reread scholars like this.

What is Avatar all about?

"Beneath the idealism and political correctness of Avatar, in the spotlight at the Oscars on Sunday, lie brutal racist undertones. . ." Slavoj Zizek's discussion of the film in the New Statesman.

Small thoughts always lead to dull words

The mistake about great oratory is to imagine it is word cleverness. It isn't. It emerges from what's being thought . . .

Werner Herzog's cave art documentary takes 3D into the depths

The film-maker has taken his 3D camera among the rocky fissures and 30,000-year-old cave artwork at Chauvet in France

Fossil skeletons may belong to an unknown human ancestor

The fossil remains found in a cave in South Africa could represent an evolutionary link between tree-dwelling apes and our earliest human ancestors to walk upright