The world’s greatest showman Phineas Taylor Barnum has come to Sheffield! Well considering he died in 1891 this isn’t exactly true but almost. Humbug is the first exhibition to make use of the new Exhibition Gallery at the University of Sheffield’s Western Bank Library and this past weekend I brought some of the family over [...]

I’ve recently finished reading a book about a translator, a tribesman in Darfur caught up in the violence when his village was destroyed by helicopter gunships in 2003, when ‘the Sudanese government-backed militias came to murder, rape and burn’ and drive the tribesmen from their lands. The Translator, his name Daoud Hari, is a Zaghawi who [...]

The LA Times has an interesting piece up about Sun Yaoting, the last eunuch to the last Chinese emperor.
Sun Yaoting was 8 when his father castrated him with a single swoop of a razor. The year was 1911, and China was in turmoil. Just a few months later rebels deposed the emperor, overturned centuries of [...]