From a very early age till late in life, Churchill wrote in order to speak of the world, the United Kingdom, and himself. On one occasion, he declared that history would be generous to him, because he was going to write it. When the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the great victor in the Second World War, it brought attention to a literary oeuvre that is indispensable to an understanding of the man and the audacity of his deeds. Drawing on the “old lion’s” own books and those that many authors have written about him, the diplomat and historian Bernardo Futscher Pereira provides us with another portrait of Winston Churchill.

A contemporary city is usually seen as a civil, secular and profane space that contrasts with its religious and ritualised rural counterpart. However, the bonds between urban space and the phenomenon of religion were of great importance historically, and still today remain active in our ways of living city life. In the text that follows, Jörg Rüpke, a German university lecturer, vice-director of the Max Weber Centre, a religious studies specialist, and author of various publications on these topics, explains that ‘the relationship between city and religion is one full of tension’.

This section offers an analysis and interpretation of Pedro Costa’s latest film, Vitalina Varela, which is understood as ‘a narrative of wickedness’. Vitalina and Ventura may well be the representation of a ‘people of the shadows’ who form a vanguard, as Hannah Arendt already mentioned with regard to the figure of the refugee.

Walid Raad catalogues the images collected in the Portfolio for Electra 8 under the signature Farid Sarroukh, “a mediocre painter who was irked (but not surprised) by his colleagues’ eager collaboration with the militias”. As Fernando Pessoa and Jorge Luis Borges show, we are all the Other of Ourselves. These lines, which are in this magazine as if it were another, speak of Walid Raad – and it is of Farid Sarroukh, too, that we are speaking.

Unexceptional words are the best specimens for observation. They go unnoticed until you stare at them long enough to realize their endless ramifications. The word feedback is a case in point.

Being the product of a laid-back environment created by musicians and sound engineers, feedback has never had the smug undertones of other imported words that crumple the fabric of the Portuguese language. Lacking a quality that would secure it a place in the circles of cosmopolitan jargon, feedback originally became a commonplace word conveying a specific, unpleasant noise. 

‘What words shall I use? What are the proper words?’ asks Electra, amid the tumult and the danger, the ravings, the revenge (Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers). In naming this journal Electra, we are making her questions our own. In choosing a name that comes from Ancient Greece, where thought emerged in all its apotheoses and disasters, in all its harmonies and conflicts, we are stating our commitment to all liberties and all dangers. The best and the worst in us were born there.

The city centre faces a time of accelerated transformations and sudden ruptures. The geographer Álvaro Domingues reflects on the subject, against the backdrop of a long-standing politics/city binomial.

What remains of the Georges Pompidou Centre forty years after it was inaugurated? What remains of its innovative cultural project and its ideas on contemporary art? These questions are candidly answered by Yves Michaud, a philosopher and art critic, and Catherine Lawless, a member of the Centre's initial team.

Lourdes Castro was born in 1930, in Funchal, Portugal, and her origins are present in her work like a watermark. She studied Painting at Lisbon’s School of Fine Arts (1950–1956). She lived in Munich for some time and, in 1958, she moved to Paris. In 1983, she went back to the island of Madeira, where she currently lives.

António Franco Alexandre is a leading figure of contemporary Portuguese poetry. His path is solitary, made of inflections and profound variations. From one book to another, we can read the disquiet and the analytical hyperconsciousness that are also the traits of a way of living. His friend and fellow poet Helder Moura Pereira translated his verses expressly for this issue.