Mitoe Matsumoto was three years and four months old when an atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki at 11.02am on 9 August 1945. Eighty-one years later, the 84-year-old Japanese survivor says the experience
Rachel Goldberg-Polin does not describe grief as a process that steadily diminishes with time. Since the death of her son Hersh, who was abducted by Hamas and killed after 328 days in
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The return of Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thera to prison has revived an old confrontation between religious influence and judicial authority. His contempt case, examined alongside landmark rulings from Sri Lanka, Britain, the
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The Rajapaksa dynasty personalised political success so completely that it also personalised failure. A return to the old formula is unlikely to address the conditions that changed Sri Lankan politics after 2022.
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The latest issue of Merkur, the German journal, takes aim at one of the increasingly popular descriptions of contemporary capitalism: “neofeudalism”. The term has gained currency as political and economic power becomes
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For years, progressive intellectuals, activists and cultural figures have argued that political imagination has weakened, leaving societies poorly equipped to confront the exhaustion of neoliberalism and ecological collapse. The response has been
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The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has claimed the language of East Germany’s peaceful revolution as its own after its record result in Saxony-Anhalt, reopening an old dispute among former civil-rights activists over
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By the time Alexander the Great died in Babylon in 323 BC, aged 32, he had accumulated more wealth than any person before him and created an empire larger than any known
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On the morning of 30 July 1929, a man carrying a small axe entered the upper terrace of the Sri Maha Bodhi in Anuradhapura and struck one of its principal branches several
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Greenland reveals the Trump Corollary in its most naked form. Far from an empty white space as it is often portrayed, this Inuit society of roughly 57,000 people has a long history
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A new biography of Stephen Hawking presents the renowned physicist not simply as a scientific celebrity who overcame severe disability, but as a researcher whose relationships, intellectual clarity and determination were central
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by Nil There is something almost unsettling about the fact that Charles Spencer’s most intimate book about Diana begins, in effect, with a question of possession: who knew her best? His mother,
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by Eric A family history can begin with a birth certificate, a grave, a photograph or a name. Edward Ball begins somewhere more difficult: with a sexual encounter whose moral meaning cannot
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Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga’s new novel Golondrinas begins with the burial of legendary boxer Urtain and follows three funerals in the same grave across 50 years, blending death, rural decline, fantasy and
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The article examines the controversy surrounding the planting of a purported Sri Maha Bodhi sapling at Vadunnagala, an ancient Buddhist archaeological site in northern Sri Lanka, by politician Sarath Weerasekara. It links
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Singapore’s success was built on a compact city-state, a strategic port, concentrated population, state-controlled housing, tightly coordinated institutions and deliberate social engineering. Sri Lanka, with its rural economy, agricultural regions, established ethnic
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