Dog proof teddy bear

A much-reproduced photograph is held by the Irish Studies Centre of London Metropolitan University. It depicts a front window with handwritten signs saying “Bed & breakfast” and “No Irish, no blacks, no dogs”. The photograph emerged only in the late 1980s, and the university has conceded to me that it is of “somewhat uncertain” provenance. They have been unable to discover who took the picture, where or when. An old news clipping which I have presented to the university points to the image having been mocked up for an exhibition called “An Irish Experience” mounted at the now-defunct Roger Casement Irish Centre in Islington, London. … [Read more...] about No Irish, no blacks, no dogs, no proof

Lorne Campbell, artistic director, Northern Stage In 2005, when I was an assistant director at the Traverse, my fringe consisted of chewing my way through a very long list of shows that needed to be seen "just in case". I watched about 90 shows in three weeks, with an unfavourable ratio of good to bad to indifferent. In the middle of the fringe in a small hall at C venues, I saw Jessica Almasy delivering a weird, wonderful and incandescently original one-woman show under the direction of Rachel Chavkin: Give Up and Start Over. This was the Team's first trip to Edinburgh, and along with their other show that year, A Thousand Natural Shocks, their political, joyful, chaotic brand of theatre seemed to crystallise a moment in the psyche of the fringe. The next year we programmed them at the Traverse, and those wild-eyed kids have now become established international artists, close friends and perpetual collaborators. That's the wonder of the fringe: you can walk into a room expecting … [Read more...] about The best show I’ve ever seen at Edinburgh: performers and theatre-makers on their festival highlights

'On top of it all, Germany just started paying Russia, the country they want protection from, Billions of Dollars for their Energy needs coming out of a new pipeline from Russia,' he tweeted. 'Not acceptable! All NATO Nations must meet their 2% commitment, and that must ultimately go to 4%!'  … [Read more...] about Trump slams May’s Brexit plan as not ‘what people voted for’ and urges her to take a tougher line on immigration

Their fantasies were overblown, but not entirely baseless. In 1965, the Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara had waved an emotional goodbye to his comrade-in-arms Fidel Castro, leaving Cuba. He vowed to initiate a new phase of revolutionary activity, extending guerrilla warfare across Latin America. Che was killed while carrying out his mission in Bolivia in 1967, but the US by then viewed revolution in Latin America as an existential threat – recalling how Russian nuclear weapons had reached Cuban soil during the 1962 missile crisis. In a bid to strengthen anti-communist forces, the US pumped money and weapons to armed forces across the region, vastly increasing the power of the military within these states and eventually, as the American journalist John Dinges has written, ending up in an “intimate embrace with mass murderers running torture camps, body dumps, and crematoriums”. In the 70s, as rightwing military coups and state terror swept … [Read more...] about Operation Condor: the cold war conspiracy that terrorised South America