There is a popular lefty comedian from Scotland called Frankie Boyle, and when Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (a biopic about an American Iraq war veteran) came out he tweeted about that movie: ‘This is like Star Wars, but told from the stormtroopers point of view’. That same tweet could be applied to Zulu. In other words, in the Anglozulu war, the British army were a powerful invading force, from the biggest empire in the world, and had no business being…

After 16 years, I finally got round to watching this. Reading Judith/ Jack Halberstam write about it so well in their book The Queer Art of Failure (a book about 'finding alternatives to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society'), was what finally gave me the push to sit down and watch it. It is, of course, an amazing film, but you all knew that already.

From The Queer Art of Failure: "By way of beginning a discussion…