• Vilém Flusser’s project against death

    Vilém Flusser’s project against death

    War Office, 4 February 2026, © 2026 Bobby Crosby This year will mark the 35th anniversary since the death of the Prague-born philosopher and media theorist Vilém Flusser, whom I quoted in a previous essay last summer. It is perhaps cliché today to dig up pre-internet media theorists and watch them seemingly predict Instagram (as…

  • Labour’s European reset will gather pace

    Labour’s European reset will gather pace

    Elizabeth Tower Crowned, 28 January 2026 © 2026 Bobby Crosby Open a world map and glance upon Britain’s place in the world. Assuming yours is a standard Mercator projection, we sit quite comfortably near the top of the middle. A fitting metaphor for our foreign policy ten years ago. The UK enjoyed an enviable position:…

  • Towards the oneness of things

    Towards the oneness of things

    Lundy Sunset, 11 July 2025, © 2025 Bobby Crosby At dusk in a Devonian rainforest, besieged by owls and deer and ferns, I began reading the English translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009). It had been indirectly recommended to me, by way of finding it on my…

  • Rudderless and rightwards: why the Labour Party is being blown off course

    Rudderless and rightwards: why the Labour Party is being blown off course

    Do Not Pass Go, 17 March 2025, © 2025 Bobby Crosby Repeated government briefings last week about considerable cuts to disability benefits, with the lion’s share of savings coming from slashing Personal Independence Payments (PIP), have rightly sparked a wave of discontent within the Labour Party. With a prime minister praising Thatcherite deregulation, reducing the…

  • Welsh Labour’s clear red water is getting murkier

    Welsh Labour’s clear red water is getting murkier

    View from Cregennen Lakes, 28 April 2024 © 2024 Bobby Crosby Welsh politics has been getting more media attention than usual recently. Upcoming Senedd elections are shaping up to be the canary in the coal mine for the future of British politics, and so commentariat eyes are turning west. At the end of last year,…

  • Knowledge, morality, and inertia in Roadside Picnic

    Knowledge, morality, and inertia in Roadside Picnic

    Presence, 5 December 2024, © 2024 Bobby Crosby My friend Edward Unwin recently sent me a copy of Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, two brothers who wrote some of the best-known Soviet science fiction outside of Russia from the late 1950s through to the 1980s. Famously, the novel inspired the 1979 film Stalker,…