MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
Steppeing out
JOHN GREEN welcomes a new history that makes the reader question both origins and national identities
timur
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production that panders – if inadvertently – to Western prejudice against China
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a history that excavates the enormous role played by agricultural workers in recent times
ALEX HALL recommends a book that places empirical evidence at the heart of understanding racism
Empires of the Steppes – the nomadic tribes who shaped civilisation
By Kenneth W Harl, Bloomsbury, £30
LIKE many other readers, I imagine, the history I learned at school was almost exclusively modern European, with its birthplace in Greek and Roman antiquity. In recent times historians have been moving away from such western eurocentrism.
Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads offered us a very different perspective on our civilisation with the centre of gravity shifted to China and the Far East. Harl’s fascinating history takes us further back in time to demonstrate that our modern world has been very much shaped by the nomadic peoples of the great steppe lands of the east in ways few of us are aware of. It was they who facilitated the emergence of the Silk Road as a vital trading and communications conduit between Asia and western Europe.
The nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppes dominated human development in the Near and Far East as well as much of Europe for around 45 centuries. From the first steppe nomads who domesticated the horse and learned how to exploit the vast grasslands of Eurasia, they helped create the peoples and languages of Europe and the Far East we are familiar with today.
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Mountains of research show that online hardcore material harms children by direct exposure and often indirectly - by those men porn inspires. Yet there are still no simple measures like age and content regulation in place, writes JOHN GREEN
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
Odysseus’s homecoming myth is treated as a factual story, with strong resonances for our contemporary world. This is an implicit anti-war film that has an urgent relevance, writes JOHN GREEN
JOHN GREEN recommends an entertaining, if harsh and instructive, study of bullying, discipline and power dynamics in schools and at work
