Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

In the first Ice Age movie, a misfit herd of a sloth, a mammoth and a sabre tooth tiger co-existed alongside humans. Two sequels later, they are hanging out in a verdant landscape supposedly under the ice with a group of dinosaurs. In their world, does time go backwards?

Visual arts uth Duckworth Ruthin Craft Centre, Ruthin Set in the scenic hills of north Wales, the re-built Ruthin Craft Centre is an ideal venue to present the work of Ruth Duckworth, one of the world’s most distinguished potters and sculptors.  Work in stoneware, porcelain and bronze made over a period of some 50 years [...]

It’s now more than 40 years since 1968, the “Year of Revolutions”. For all those who were inspired by the momentous events in Paris, Berlin, Berkeley and even London, life could never be the same again. Yet memories of student and worker radicalism have now been effectively silenced by our obsessions with shopping and reality television, our fear of terror and a pervading sense of economic gloom.

“Scratch the tinsel in Hollywood to find the real tinsel”. The words bring a wonderful throaty laugh from a Yorkshireman in Los Angeles, mythologised as a playboy painter, hedonist, liberated gay, fashion icon and a truly gifted artist.

“Have our traditional high streets reached the end of the road?” demanded Mary Portas, striding past the boarded-up shop-fronts of a recession-struck Tewkesbury. This raised a question of my own about Mary Portas: Save Our Shops. Had television’s favourite retail guru finally found a problem she couldn’t fix in the shopping woes of an entire town? So annoyed have I become by her hectoring style that part of me almost hoped she had.

It took Basil Bunting a long time to get noticed; but then, very quickly, he was forgotten again. Bunting was hailed by Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky in the 1930s as a significant poet in the Modernist movement but it was not until the publication of Briggflatts, in the mid-1960s, that he was recognised here in Britain. Cyril Connolly described Briggflatts as “the finest long poem to have been published in England since TS Eliot’s Four Quartets” and Hugh MacDiarmid wrote that Bunting’s poems “are the most important which have appeared in any form of the English language since TS Eliot’s The Waste Land” but, by the time he died in 1985, he had once again fallen out of fashion and out of favour.

The CV of the educator Naomi Sargent, who passed away three years ago, is impressive, to say the least. Not only was she Professor of Social Research andro Vice-Chancellor of the Open Univeristy, but Channel 4’s first senior commissioning editor for educational programming and a distinguished advisor to successive governments. Her numerous other public appoinments included chair of the National Gas Consumer Council and of Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Dan Mathews is proof, if it were needed, that charm is a verb – something you do. Mathews, senior vice-president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, does charm very well indeed. When we meet at his modest west London hotel to talk about his recently-published memoir, Committed: A Rabble Rouser’s Memoir, I am curious to know how this “fat queer” from Orange County metamorphosed into the kind of man for whom many of the world’s most beautiful women regularly strip off at the drop of a hat or, at least, on receiving a phone call from Mathews.

World in Crisis is a collection of articles written between 2004 and 2008 on a variety of interconnected subjects relating to global security and the present economic crisis. While the overall tone is every bit as alarmist as the book’s title and its cover with its disconcerting image of a planet (Earth) apparently engulfed in an inferno, the writing is every bit as soberly perspicacious as we would expect from a scholar of the calibre of Gabriel Kolko.