Desire is one of those human propensities which is clearly a long stick with two ends, a continuum that can encompass both vice and virtue, with various intermediate stages.

Take a moment to read these two words and pay attention to the range of emotions they make you feel. Focus on them briefly; maybe say them out loud: Sin, Desire.

The Romans absorbed the Greeks and concocted a curious blend of civil order and imperial brutality. This looked familiar to me, for I grew up during the Vietnam War era: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The simplest of desires can lead to the most terrible of fates. That’s what Zahida al-Ahmad found out one night when, exhausted after work, she desired a cigarette.

Sexual liberties remain one of the most controversial and contested freedoms in the Middle East. Despite the mild normalisation of open expressions of sexuality in popular culture, sexual liberties can never be taken for granted anywhere in the region.

Constructed out of steel rings, two giant human figures – one male , one female – stand on the seafront. Periodically, the two halves of this eerie outsize couple, each eight metres tall, move slowly towards each other. Briefly, the rings interlock and the figures fuse. Then, inexorably, they glide apart again.

While Indian cinema has often been celebrated as a cinema of love and of the family, it has its own ways of showing desire.

Desire is an emotion in the present for something that exists in the future. 

Postnormal times thinking sees the speed, scale, scope, and simultaneity (4Ss) of our globalised, digital, networked environment drive increasingly complex, contradictory, and chaotic (3Cs) accelerating change.