SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
Vanilla: A global history
Evocative account of a plant valued in nearly every culture for ts aroma and taste
HUGELY PROLIFIC: Vanilla
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
RON JACOBS welcomes the translation into English of an angry cry from the place they call the periphery
GUILLERMO THOMAS recommends a useful book aimed at informing activists with local examples of solidarity in action around the world
HENRY BELL is provoked by a book that looks toward, but does not fully explore the question of who gets to imagine the shapes of cities to come
ROSA ABREU-RUNKEL’S Vanilla is anything but — if that word is taken to mean bland or predictable.
Her book tells the story of 500 hundred years of mercantile and capitalist innovation and exploitation through the cultivation and consumption of the cured, dried and conditioned beans of the vanilla planifolia plant, part of the orchid family.
It’s a very fussy plant requiring quite narrow ranges of humidity, pH values and temperature to thrive and the pollination process is very challenging, as early European cultivators found to their irritation.
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An absorbing metaphor for contemporary Western societies is recommended by PAUL SIMON
PAUL SIMON falls under the spell of little known authors from an island at the edge of the world
