Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

Although I have only seen it in flashes between the trees, I have a connection with Sarajevo, It looked beautiful. Past the rocky slopes and cracking pine cones, it shone at me from a valley. You can see my great grandfather Izy on the steps of the town hall in pictures, part of the committee that gave the Archduke Franz Ferdinand his send off. In India, during Indira Gandhi's emergency, long ago now, I met my first girlfriend, a budding Yugoslavian. She had obsidian eyes, fine bronze hair, a smile like the Medusa and stubby fingers. In1976 Yugoslavia seemed like a peaceful place and I romanticised it because I remembered Natasha and I felt I was a socialist and I was only 16. A year later, in summer, we lived together for a month. In 1980. She left her new boyfriend in town and took me to a small Island off the coast. We slept in the forest and swam in a bay surrounded by yellow rocks like. Her friends seemed to have so much time to waste, to get themselves into existential knots.

It's rare that you watch an action movie that makes you laugh out loud at the crux of the action. Watching Jason Bourne hide at the back of the Thresher's off license in Waterloo station was such a moment. And to top it all, in the hot heart of the frenetic action, as Bourne and a Guardian Journalist negotiate W. H. Smiths, placed slap bang in the middle of the Waterloo concourse, the loudspeakers announce that "The train to Chessington South will be leaving from platform 8." "But, hey, that's my train!" The Bourne movies have had quite a good stab at capturing a tiny bit of the spirit of places where they are set. This was important to their success. The Moroccan and Madrid stair wells, a modern German home, all these little touches. But they could have gone a little further, they could have provided little holographic shards or narrative rather than just a bit of reflected shatter. "The train to Chessington South will be leaving from platform 8.&

Drew A. Hyland has a point when he argues in 1973 against philosophy as a Hegelian view of history. And he is also right to mark out the importance of the Epic of Gilgamesh. From my perspective of the 21st century I always thought the story was silly. A comic-like story of a sexually ambivilant superhero. What was that thing he had going with Enkidu? All that wrestling in the dust. Enkidu Shams and Gilgamesh Rumi. But Gilgamesh wasn't Superman, he wasn't, as Tarantino suggested in Kill Bill II, a snide critique on the weakness of men or Chabon's Kavalier and Clay fantasizing about saving all our grandparents from the ovens of Treblinka and Aushwitz. Gilgamesh headed straight for the ovens of Ishtar. The figure of Gilgamesh is worthy of being the first human figure in myth. greater. Gilgamesh would fight for humanity's dignity and place in what Pythagoras was to call the kosmos. Gilgamesh, as quoted by Hyland says: "Shamash, listen to me, listen to me Shamash, l

The language of Tarkovsky is poetic and he expresses himself cinematographically through images of melting ice and trees moving in breezes that swell up unexpectedly. Tarkovsky work is incohate, while barns and candles burn and vast oceans move with sentience. Tarkovsky's landscapes are always sentient. The rhythms of car and train journeys play against the unspoken thoughts of Tarkovsky's characters, which, in turn, still unrevealed, play against the watching cinema audience like Rimbaud's sunlight reflecting off water. Long slow camera shots allow us to dwell in Tarkovsky's iconography and share his sentiment. We feel we may even sense the characters heartbeats and, doing so, our own heartbeat breaks through in synchrony. We watch the candle flicker as the writer shields it from the eddies of air blowing up dry leaves in the empty swimming pool, and we can't help but hear the softly snickering whispers. Who's that? Who's there? Can you hear them too? And t

The best charity bookshops in London are Oxfam bookshops. The books are well shelved, sorted according to subject area and alphabetically and priced slightly more highly. And the best book section in an Oxfam bookshop, I don't mind sharing this with you, is run by "the book lady" in Twickenham . Her name is Felicity. Felicity must be in her late 80s. She is thin and smiles and wears pince nez . Her diction is slow, and her vowels and consonants are grooved into the the clarity and timbre of the 1940s. She says she is so pleased when she can "match a person with a book." She thinks that "well, most literature is either Dionysian or Apollonian, isn't it." - she says this with another cheering smile. Recently, I bought from her, for 2 pounds, a 150 year old red leather bound volume of Sir. Walter Scott's poetry (Why on Earth did I do that?), A book including two of Thomas Paine's pieces, and three other books: Fraser, The Golden Bough, the

Post-war praise from US establishment quarters for 1. the Soviets 2. the French Communists Extract from a (1945) article on the difference between Fascism and Communism , as quoted by K Zilliacus, British MP: The USSR, like the US, is opposed to the fundamental Fascist ideas on which Germany has operated: (1) The master race; (2) the State is all important; (3) Lebensraum: and (4) desire to dominate the world. Master Race : If the US is a ‘melting pot’, then the Soviet Union is an electric mixer. Scientists have counted 189 ‘races’ in USSR. Under the Tsars, many of the racial minorities were persecuted; today in the Soviet Union, there is no such thing as racial discrimination in practice or in theory. The people of each ‘race’ have been encouraged to retain their own language, customs and individuality and to educate themselves and develop the economic area in which they live. All-Important State : Some people profess to see strong likeness between the Soviet and Nazi forms of govern

We must believe in and work toward the further development of Regions. Regions as loose networks of nations, as freemarket areas, as confederations, even as federations and ultimately unions. Witness the historical and epic achievements and lovely narrative of the Coal and Steel Community evolving into the European Common Market and the European Union, spawning, on the way, the political and economic renaissance of its second line members, Spain and Portugal out of fascism and into prosperity, Greece out of royalist and rightwing oppression, Ireland out of historical marginalisation and deep cultural oppression, not to mention the way Irish Republican prosperity has helped the North into a peaceful settlement. Look into your history of the last few decades and note how left of centre French leaders ( Mitterand )have worked together on the European project with right of centre German leaders (Kohl), right of centre French leaders ( Chirac ), with left of centre Germans ( Schroeder ).