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MAYER WAKEFIELD is chilled by the co-dependency of two lost souls as portrayed by German communist playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz
Best albums of 2024 with Tony Burke
A horn of plenty, no less!
The Star's critics BRETT GREGORY, JOHN GREEN, MICHAEL BONCZA and ANGUS REID review The Stimming Pool, Misericordia, La Cocina, Irena’s Vow, and The End
CHRIS MOSS welcomes a radical history that brings marginalised stories and overlooked people and agencies to the centre
ANDREW HEDGECOCK relishes visual storytelling with no respect for genres, movements or styles
MARK TURNER is staggered by a gifted jazz pianist from the Welsh Valleys
JESSICA WIDNER explores how the twin themes of violence and love run through the novels of South Korean Nobel prize-winner Han Kang
SARAH TROTT explores short fictional slices of life in the American midwest from a middle-aged and mostly female perspective
CDs, vinyl and downloads vied for attention almost every week during 2024. There was so much good music issued it was hard to keep up, but I’m not complaining!
On the rock front the Irish guitar hero Rory Gallagher’s double CD set culled from his 20-disc box set of BBC radio broadcasts The Best Of Rory Gallagher At The BBC (BBC Sessions) features Rory appearing on Radio One’s Sounds Of The ’70s and In Concert between 1973-1979. Easily the best hard core rock reissue album of 2024.
Fellow Irishman, Van Morrison released Live At Orangefield (Orangefield Records) compiled from three sold-out shows played in August 2014, to mark the closure of his old secondary school in Belfast — the venue of his first public performance at Christmas 1959, leading a skiffle group on Lead Belly’s Midnight Special.
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New releases by Samba Touré, Santrofi, and Piers Faccini & Ballake Sissoko
The towering figures of the North American right and the South American left are set to clash this summer as Brazil hosts Brics, an alliance Trump is determined to smash, reports TONY BURKE
The looming Trump presidency has forced unions to rebuild their unity and strength, writes TONY BURKE, as the SEIU returns to the AFL-CIO, healing the 2005 rift over organising priorities and getting ready to fight the right together
TONY BURKE reports on growing industrial unrest as Volkswagen plans its first German plant closures in 90 years amid its struggles to gain a place in the growing EV market, putting it on a collision course with IG Metall
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