Drew Forrest

Creator

Drew Forrest

Drew Forrest is a former deputy editor of the M&G

Artist Kim Berman stands in front of her image entitled “Atonement”.

Kim Berman’s fire sermon

The artist’s latest exhibition, spanning 40 years, celebrates ‘the victory of memory over forgetting’

Drew Forrest

A mural depicting Nelson Mandela in Catholic Belfast. (Sherry McLean)

The message of the murals

Belfast’s famous wall paintings provide a snapshot of relations between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. More than 25 years after the signing of the Good Friday…

Drew Forrest

The discovery of a new species of human relative, Homo Naledia was unveiled at The Cradle of Human Kind at Maropeng in Johannesburg, South Africa. Naledi was discovered in a hard to reach chamber in the Rising Star Cave which has led scientists to believe that the Hominids had a understanding of the finality of death. Naledi stood about 1,5m high, had a unique mix of primitive and modern features with a tiny brain about the size of an orange, a slender body and unusually curved fingers. (Photo by Denzil Maregele/Foto24/Gallo Images/Getty Images)

The no-prisoner Naledi wars

DREW FORREST looks at the fierce academic controversies ignited by South Africa’s most recent hominin find

Drew Forrest

Then Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and Professor Lee Berger hold a replica of the skull of a Homo naledi during the unveiling of the discovery. (File photo)

ANCIENT BURIAL PRACTICES

The God Edition | Searching among the bones for Homo naledi’s soul

Drew Forrest uses one of South Africa’s most important hominid discoveries to debate the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the religious doctrine of ‘ensoulment’

Drew Forrest

Deluded: JD Vance has lurched to the hard right since the publication of his autobiography. Photo: White House

US state and the capture of JD Vance

The United States’ vice-president has risen with lightning speed from hardscrabble beginnings

Drew Forrest

Only their bones remain: An impression of a Neolithic village. The genes of a whole people vanished in the shift from the late Stone Age to the Bronze Age.

The riddle of the missing genes

The roots of group violence in the deep past may explain the atrocities that are committed today

Drew Forrest

Samurai stock: Japanese writer and nationalist Yukio Mishima, author of The Sea of Fertility

Mishima’s masterpiece reborn

The resurgence of Japanese fiction owes much to the controversial genius of Yukio Mishima. Drew Forrest re-examines his final novel cycle

Drew Forrest

KHAN YUNIS, GAZA – NOVEMBER 6: People search through buildings, destroyed during Israeli air raids in the southern Gaza Strip on November 6, 2023 in Khan Yunis, Gaza. The Israeli army has expanded its military assault. The Gaza strip, a besieged Palestinian territory, is under heavy bombing from Israel in response to the large-scale attack carried out on October 7 by Hamas in Israel. The international community is stepping up pressure for a humanitarian truce. (Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE

Israel’s ‘settler logic of elimination’

Israel’s seemingly limitless brutality is rooted in ‘the logic of dehumanisation’

Drew Forrest

Desperate: An image of a family home during the Irish famine from 1845 to 1850, in which more than a million people died. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

The British Empire’s impact on Ireland’s Great Hunger

Drew Forrest looks at the role of Victorian laissez-faire in the terrible Irish famine

Drew Forrest

(Graphic: John McCann/M&G)

A tale of two risings: Ireland and South Africa

There are marked parallels between the two countries’ liberation wars

Drew Forrest

Hurling (Irish: Iománaíocht/Iomáint) is an outdoor team game of ancient Gaelic and Irish origin, administered by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). The game has prehistoric origins, has been played for over 3,000 years,and is considered to be the world’s fastest field sport.

BLOODY SUNDAY CROKE PARK

An epic hurling battle and football fever at Dublin’s Croke Park

DREW FORREST takes in a traditional Gaelic pastime at Ireland’s biggest sports arena

Drew Forrest

Violence: Director Roman Polanski’s experience of Nazi crimes as a child and the murder of his wife Sharon Tate might have contributed to the tendency towards brutality in his films. Photo: Beata Zawrzel/Getty Images

CHARLOTTE LEWIS

Taking pot shots at Polanski

The director’s masterful, technically brilliant work is lacking in humanity

Drew Forrest

Supporters of South Africa’s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), sing and dance at the launch of the party’s canvassing drive in Crossroads, Cape Town, 08 February 2004, a day after the DA launched its election campaign vowing to prevent a ‘one party state’ ruled by the African National Congress (ANC) by creating a ‘real multi-party democracy’. South African president Thabo Mbeki is due to announce the date of the 2004 general elections in parliament 09 February. AFP PHOTO/ANNA ZIEMINSKI

From the 2004 M&G election archives

Twenty years ago, our analyst wrote that the ANC had not erred catastrophically enough in government to give the opposition a foot in the door

Drew Forrest

An Israeli soldier sits on a tank before entering into the Gaza Strip on April 10, 2024 in Southern Israel. (Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images)

OPINION: Israel’s crackdown on calories

Was the terrible murder of seven aid workers part of the use of food as a weapon, which has claimed its first lives in Gaza?

Drew Forrest

Neverending fight: Albert Camus, author of La Peste, uses a plague to explore humanity and belief in God in fighting a catastrophe. Another layer of meaning may be the plague is a symbol of Nazi Germany’s occupation of France in World War II. Photo: Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

‘Salvation is too big a word for me’

Drew Forrest examines the battle between dogmatic faith and practical humanism in French master Albert Camus’ finest novel, ‘The Plague’

Drew Forrest