Sport is about the fastest, the strongest, the most lithe: the sprinter diving first to the line; the muscleman of stretched cheeks and gritted teeth capable of pushing beyond his known limits; the gymnast who can hold air and dance against gravity for the longest. This is why sports' photography, of the sort exhibited in the Guardian Magazine Olympic special this weekend, is so compelling. In capturing a moment, the photograph is an antithetical medium to that which it represents; the image constricts within its frame a person whom we know from the context has, even as the shutter clicks, burst beyond its limits. Paradoxically, its moment of stillness reveals, more than to the eye watching in real-time, the speed of the action.

And just as Eadweard Muybridge's images of a horse exposed, as if through a microscope, a secret rendered invisible by the powerful beauty of natural motion, so sports' photography continues to enthrall by demonstrating the minute muscular spasms which must combine perfectly and in sequence to let the sprinter cut the tape, the weightlifter achieve the impossible, the gymnast spin with flair and ease. It always looks so easy on television; through the photograph's capture of time, in which it exposes the athlete's efforts to defy time, we realise this is not so.

Labels: Photography and Art, sport photography

Penguin Books have created a new series of slim titles featuring thinkers and revolutionaries, from Seneca to Orwell, Gibbon to Marx. This can only be a positive development, helping to broaden the cultural experience of those non-academics who would otherwise run shy - perhaps understandably, given the way philosophy, like literary criticism, is increasingly sealed in a complex and exclusive vocabulary - from anything hallmarked with philosophy. The danger, of course, as with the Big Read, is that bite-size chunks of text (one commentator likened the books to smarties) become perceived as the authoritative end, rather than the beginning, of exploration and reading. Also, their focus is unashamedly on Western and White authors, a shame given that here was an opportunity here to correct the dangerously popular and unbalanced perception, in the contemporary age, that the Muslim world has contributed little to the sum of global knowledge. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that, if the series takes off and proves popular (one million copies in the first year is the publisher's target), subsequent additions could expand and fill the gaps.

Labels: Literature

Hugo Hamilton's chillingly frank memoir tells the story of his childhood in Ireland. Hamilton, with his Irish father and German mother, finds himself torn between linguistic and moral codes. His father is defiantly nationalistic, against the trend of their home town, resorting to violence to enforce his demand that the children grow up as "Irish," not an Anglo-Irish corruption; his mother, in contrast and opposition, encourages the imagination and exploration (often leading to realms of humourous mischief) as the by-laws for growth to adulthood.

The family becomes a mirroring microcosm of the political events which preceded Hamilton's birth. The paradox, of which the young Hamilton becomes increasingly though never fully aware, is that his Irish father has the similar impulses of the "fist people" of Nazi nationalism, whilst his German mother seems more naturally aligned with the Irish dream of achieving independence through "invention and imagination".

Labels: Hugo Hamilton, Literature, Speckled People