In 1936, when the winds of war were in the air, a 26 year old American man Samuel Barber (three years younger than Timothée Chalamet ) wrote Adagio of the Strings. He was in a chalet in St. Wolfgang, a small town about an hour from Salzburg, nestled between mountains and the beautiful lake Wolfgangsee. He was with the love of his life, the Italian music student he met whilst studying at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. These lovers regularly escaped the danger

Walk into the temple of the great Goddess Inanna in Uruk around 3,500 BCE and the first thing you'd encounter is not an altar — it's an accountant. The temple ran the granary (protected by cats), the textile production, the trade ledgers. The first writing in human history was not scripture or poetry, it was temple accounting. Receipts for grain, copper, spices, textiles. The goddess's house was simultaneously the city's bank, its trading house, its chamber of commerce and it

Bring it on. I mean it. And every person on the planet with a brain should too. We've all heard the prophecies of the end of days. It certainly feels close. And the zealots on all sides of the religious divide are going to comical lengths to ensure their version of Armageddon plays out. You know — the obvious one like the Antichrist appearing as a man of peace.

We all woke this morning to find the world on the brink of Armageddon. Nobody wants this. Only 6% of Americans openly support another pointless war in the MIddle East, American soldiers are apparently blocking toilets in the USA's flagship air carrier, which could be seen as an act of mutiny. And the Epstein files have twisted the truth so far that no conspiracy theory is out of bounds. It's all the work of that pesky child god Baal again, honestly, anyone with even the sligh

Margaret Atwood famously said, "Women are afraid men will kill them. Men are afraid women will laugh at them." Grab your Tena pads ladies, this one's a doozy! One of the first things that jumped out for me in the Epstein files was his bank account called 'Baal'. A few days later a statue of Baal, half-man half-bull adorned with stars of David was burned on the streets of Tehran. And we've all heard the stories of cannibalism, torture and child sacrifice on the island and ranc

In 1979, I stepped off a plane into a place I wasn't allowed to name. My art school buddy grabbed my arm before customs. 'Three words you can never say here: Palestine. Yasser Arafat. And cus amak.' I knew the last one meant c*nt. But the first two? Just a place and a person. 'What do we call it then?" "The Holy Land." Forty-six years later, the British Museum is playing the same game. They have scrubbed the word Palestine from exhibits about people who lived 3,500 years ago.