It might be just too easy to describe the work of Anselm Kiefer as monumental. In his 200 acre ‘workshop’ near Barjac in the Cévennes, he has dotted the landscape-cumplayground with towers of shipping containers and 12-foot lead battleships. At another site outside of Paris, his assistants use bikes to travel between vast walls lined with his paintings. One of his most indicative paintings, Margarete (1981), comes in at 110 x 150.

Kiefer’s work reaches monumental proportions not just in size, but in its very subject matter. Born in Germany in 1945, Kiefer has throughout his career revisited themes such as the Holocaust, German and Egyptian mythology, art, death and destruction.

His pieces overflow with references. Margarete owes its name to the German guard in ‘Todesfuge’, a poem by the Romanian Jewish writer Paul Celan, who survived the Nazi work-camps and eventually committed suicide in 1970. Seeing the painting and an English translation, ‘Death Fugue’, side-byside in Kiefer’s astonishing retrospective at the Royal Academy last year cast a powerful spell. Raw materials are a common feature in Kiefer’s work; high spires of real straw loom over the onlooker in Margarete, representing the subject’s golden Aryan hair and the unsettling idea of racial purity. The tips of the straw end in flames, to suggest funereal candles and Kiefer’s belief in the spiritual, circular connection of earth and sky, joined by these smoking pyres.

That this crop rises from charred, ashcovered earth adds as much to the painting’s expressive and textural layers. We are haunted by the blackened hair of Celan’s Jewish prisoner Shulamith and the devastating effects of war on German land. The name ‘Margarete’ hangs scribbled among the straw tendrils of rising smoke, as a painful memorial or a chilling ode to Kiefer’s tainted heritage.

Although its rough surface and elongated, ghostly movement did not particularly warm my cockles, Kiefer has managed to capture a feeling of resurrection. The horrors of the Third Reich and Celan’s own experiences now yield art and poetry, not silence, torture and fear, challenging Adorno’s famous claim about ‘poetry after Auschwitz’. For Kiefer, “Creation and destruction are one and the same,” and the monumental spires of Margarete point far beyond tragedy and into the greater universe.

“You are now entering Free Derry.” The first writing on the wall; the first mural of the Troubles. Painted in 1969, these six words of graffiti would spur a movement across each of the six counties of Northern Island, splashing territorial art on innumerable streets – “a canvas on every corner”.

Today, there are estimated to be over 2,000 murals in Belfast and Londonderry alone. Visually documenting the regions’ turbulent history, these murals also demonstrate the psychological power of propaganda art.One of the most famous of the images to come out of the Irish conflict is the Shankill Mona Lisa, commissioned by the Ulster Freedom Force. It shows a balaclava-clad paramilitary soldier flanked by insignia. Pointing the barrel of the gun outwards, the rifle of the soldier seems to follow you as you walk around it.

While seemingly intended to intimidate their enemies with an implied threat, this oftenviolent imagery also had the purpose of instilling fear and compliance at the ‘home turf’. As Professor Bill Rolston says, these murals were as much “directed inwards at communities” as they were directed towards their adversaries.

In both the LoyalistProtestant and RepublicanCatholic communities, kneecappings and punishment-beatings were regular occurrences. Employed against petty criminals for supposedly sowing social discord, they were also used as a means for exacting private revenge and for demonstrating authority.

In republican areas, there was more of a propaganda dimension to the murals. Whether with good reason or not, republicans in Northern Ireland are able to link their experiences with the struggles of oppressed peoples around the world much more easily. As you walk through Belfast, you would not be unlikely to see murals in solidarity with Palestinians, Basques or Aboriginal Australians.

In that sense there are perhaps three classes of murals: those seeking to propagandise with images of violence, those with images of solidarity, and those with images of history. In the latter camp are paintings designed for everyone, regardless of their differences, to be able to celebrate – paintings of C. S. Lewis and George Best, to name but two.

Psychological studies have shown, however, that pictures of firearms can elicit aggression. In the era of the post-Good Friday Agreement, many people are therefore calling for the painting-over of some of the murals. In a time of peace, they say, images of violence and death looming over people’s heads will do nothing but continue to breed the hostility and anxiety of war. It seems that whether by the combatant or the civilian, the potential power and influence of the mural is clear and understood.

Confession: I love Jilly Cooper, Marian Keyes, Louise Bagshawe and Tilly Bagshawe. Anything with a bit of sparkly pink glitter on the cover and a picture of a palm tree. In short, I’d often rather be reading a bonkbuster in the bath than Leo Tolstoy (here’s hoping that my English tutors aren’t reading this article). And yet, I’m slightly embarrassed to admit as much. No one wants to be a literary bore who reads nothing but Russian tomes (do they?), but to confess to enjoying Riders is a bit like intellectual suicide.

Am I trashy because I like easy-reading when on a beach (or at home)? Tawdry because I enjoy a hyperbolic romance? Dirty because I like to be swept up in a world of questionable writing and invariably predictable plots?

Fifty Shades of Grey probably could be classified as a bit dirty, yes, but all the many millions of its readers most certainly are not. As the usual differentiating hallmarks between segments of society become thankfully less clear, culture is increasingly used as a means of Austen-style distinction. The value of ‘good’ literature is in its ability to provoke discussion, but that can be a discussion that can often be limited – or be perceived to be limited – to a highbrow, intelligentsia, dinner party-driven reader. And the issues don’t stop there. Reading a wide variety of literary genres/ qualities is important not only in order to avoid intellectual snobbery. To cast value judgments is also surely to assume a standard that is detrimental to the creativity of literary productivity, to hinder reading for the sake of enjoyment (a totally foreign concept for many an Oxford student) and to prevent a full interaction with ‘good literature’.

After all, how the hell do we really appreciate the brilliant descriptions of sexual pleasure in the novels of D.H. Lawrence if we haven’t read the many ‘clichés’ that come after them? Surely to read anything is good, regardless of whether they are thought to be ‘good’, because in doing so we ask ourselves what we appreciate in literature. To read widely and openly is something that should therefore be encouraged as much as possible. Of course, there are issues to be had with ‘chick lit’. Its very name denotes a literature that finds its basis in a generalised and derogatory perception of women and that the plots of almost all chick lit novels are the same re-enforces the idea that women are generally the same.

The fact that we live in a world that is increasingly consumer-driven should raise issues with any literature produced for the purpose of selling copies, particularly when one considers artistic integrity. The fact that world is also largely rooted in a disposable culture should provoke concerns about the popularity of unchallenging and therefore more disposable writing, if only in order to protect writing that refuses to conform to such standards. But just as you wouldn’t walk into a tutorial on Wordsworth without having read any of his work, no one should criticise E. L. James without having read a word she has written.

I recently had a discussion with my 78 year old grandmother on what she thought about the Fifty Shades phenomenon, which she had just finished and placed proudly on a shelf in the kitchen. Yes, my grandmother. Though the family around the table varied in response from comic amusement to horror, the subsequent discussion was one of the most interesting and entertaining we’ve ever had as extended family. It proved to me that to read as widely as you can, at whatever age you can, has to be important for genuine social interaction as much as for personal fulfillment, and as important for fulfillment as it is for pleasure.

This is in fact the second of Anthony Maskell’s directorial efforts to which I have been exposed. In the first exposure, I saw an unlikely trio comprised of an assassin, a priest and a pregnant woman. With his latest work, Elephants, it seems he’s advanced to quartets. Yet what is gained in numbers seems to have been lost in variety. This time our characters are the uniformly bourgeois Laura (Olivia Homewood), Greg (Alex Hill), Jennifer (Maddy Walker) and Todd (Anthony Maskell). Yet as any victim of a dinner party will tell you, the premise of this middle class meeting is every bit as lethal as anything involving an assassin.

In this story, two couples come together for what should be a perfectly civilised evening. Lurking in the background however, are two delicate issues set to derail the locomotive of polite society. In the scene I was shown, the separated (but not yet divorced couple) Greg and Laura are fighting it out after parents’ evening. In those hugely enjoyable 15 minutes, the poor Greg (apparently a successful writer) is subject to a more thorough and cutting character dissection than most of his novels probably manage. In those 15 minutes we get everything from “remember when we used to be sexy” to Greg’s drinking problems.

It was hugely enjoyable in that slightly perverted way one (well, I do anyway) enjoys really well scripted bitching. In its most civilised guise you see it at its best in something like Yes Minister, at its worst in something like Mean Girls. I very much look forward to seeing which one of these poles Maskell’s theatrical expedition from film will take him. Especially after we find out that the insidious Laura, having subjected Greg to this ordeal, has arranged the afore- mentioned dinner party in which they will have to pretend to be a happily married couple in order that they might secure their child’s place at a top school.