CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Theodore Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa
The Raft of the Medusa
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
ON JULY 2, 1816, the French navy frigate Meduse ran aground 100 miles off the coast of Mauretania in Africa due to the navigational incompetence of its master Viscount Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, a protege of the French foreign minister.
Some 147 people — for whom there was no room in the lifeboats — were put on an improvised raft to be towed. But, in a callous act of wilful and criminal negligence of duty, it was cut adrift on the orders of de Chaumareys.
Only 15 were to survive the two-week ordeal at sea before they were rescued. Immediately, stories of dehydration, starvation, brutality, murder and cannibalism emerged, when a report by the ship’s surgeon, Henri Savigny, was leaked to the newspaper Journal des Debats and published on September 13 1816.
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