I was so looking forward to this film. Although it had always been on my radar, I first watched the original (director’s cut) in the mid-nineties while I was in my early twenties having bought it because it was going cheap in HMV. I found it totally enthralling, gripping and affecting and have watched it again several times since. Looking back, there are several reasons why the film is so good I think. The first is that the story is absolutely compelling, synthetic human beings grown in test-tubes to serve as slave-labour for a humanity that had overstayed it’s welcome…

First we have to give props to Mehdi Hasan for asking this question. Many a time I have wondered as a ‘black’ person, where is the empathy for ‘the struggle’ from our Muslim brothers and sisters? Here in the UK, the reality TV show ‘Muslims Like Us’ lifted the lid-in explosive fashion-on the racial tensions that exist within the Muslim world . Some years ago, the leader of the Islamic community to which I belong had to take it’s Pakistani-American members to task over their favouring of ‘white’ converts to the neglect of African American ones and the same thing…

When I first heard about the upcoming film ‘American Sniper’ directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Bradley Cooper, I knew straight away that I wanted to see it. My dad being a big fan, I was ‘brought-up’ on Eastwood films from a young age and I feel that I know his work, as both actor and director, well. Known for playing one-dimensional, mean and tough anti-heroes who shoot first and ask questions later, the reality is that his on-screen personas often had to endure being stripped of their swagger, their cool and the use of their gun and ended up…

In Praise of his St Paul’s at Covent Garden

The place I want to talk about is made of stone, a material that is everywhere in central London, and in every form; hewn, slivered, restrained, reconstituted, a valuable material devalued by ubiquity and constructional taxidermy, diced within an inch of it’s life,rendering buildings as emasculated fragments, shorn of essentiality as crust-less loaves.

Effie Gray….The Fairytale

I have thus entitled this review, not to disparage a film that I admit I found as a Ruskin fan, a difficult watch, nor indeed to take issue with the version of events as recounted by Emma Thompson’s script, but rather (and I know how this will sound, but bear with me), to give you the true essence of the film.

There is a brief narration right at the start which uses the language and style of fairytale to encapsulate the story…

’Once upon a time there were two families (Ruskin’s and Gray’s)

‘One was very wicked…

Beyond Utilitas Firmitas & Venustas

The particulars of the building’s genesis make grim recollection. Stephen Lawrence was murdered in 1993, the year I took my GCSE’s and by which time I had pretty much decided that I was going to be an architect. That’s an awkward way to begin an article on a public building dedicated to a murdered teenager, but when Stephen Lawrence died he had also decided the same. He was 18.
The building has been on my ‘to-be-visited’ list for some time, but being from Croydon, south-east London -where the building is situated- has always been on the…

A work colleague recently told me an interesting story. There existed an ancient tree within the grounds of his ancestral home. An elder in the family had often extolled the sanctity of this tree and had warned against causing damage to or even disrespecting it. The elder used to say that the tree was a link to an invisible world and sustained an invisible, magical form of life. The Romans would have called it the genius loci, my Muslim colleague referred to it as a jinn. When the elder passed away the estate, including the tree, was sold off with…