MARIA DUARTE, LEO BOIX and ANGUS REID review Brides, Dead of Winter, A Night Like This, and The Librarians
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Hardly civilised
ALEX HALL asks whether ‘western civilisation’ is simply a disruptive polarisation in what was historically a diverse and interconnected world
BARBARITY: Palestinians look at the destruction after an Israeli strike where displaced people were staying in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Monday, May 27, 2024. Palestinian health workers said Israeli airstrikes killed at least 35 people in the area. US weapons are alleged to have been used in the assault.
[Jehad Alshrafi/AP] ![REBELS: Ebada Hassan and Safiyya Ingar in Nadia Fall’s powerful debut feature Brides [Pic: IMDb]](https://msd11.gn.apc.org/sites/default/files/styles/desktop/public/2025-09/round%20up%20web_0.jpg.webp?itok=41xI6jhN)
MARY CONWAY recommends an early Shakespearean tragedy that feels so contemporary that it mirrors our daily news
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin
DAVID NICHOLSON recommends a dazzling production of Bernstein’s opera set in a world where chaos and violence are greeted by equanimity
MARY CONWAY is frustrated by a new play that loses its drama amid the moral dilemma of re-settling children in the aftermath of WWII
Acclaimed as a masterpiece when it premiered, this study of story-telling in an Irish pub more than lives up to expectations, says MARY CONWAY
SYLVIA HIKINS relishes a comedy that dives deep into Liverpool’s divided loyalties
How The World Made The West
Josephine Quinn, Bloomsbury, £30
WHEN Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilisation, he replied he thought it might be a good idea. Josephine Quinn, in her survey of 4,000 years of history, implies Gandhi might have been being quite generous.
Western civilisation doesn’t have much definitively Western in it, and it’s wrong to think in terms of a civilisation. There aren’t really “peoples,” there are people who travelled, learned, borrowed, and adapted. And often “civilisation” doesn’t quite stand up its reputation.
“Western civilisation” sees itself as the direct inheritance of ancient Greece and Rome. Democracy, liberty, philosophy, theatre and concrete are bequeathed to the West, from the ancients, via the Renaissance.
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