LRB Cover
Volume 34 Number 3
9 February 2012

LRB blog 7 February 2012

Julian Sayarer
Going Slow

6 February 2012

Peter Pomerantsev
Royal Woolwich

3 February 2012

Oliver Miles
Why are we in Afghanistan?

MOST READ

5 January 2012

Stephen Holmes
Putin’s Russia

22 August 2002

Christopher Tayler
Alain de Botton goes on a trip

24 June 2010

Terry Eagleton
Craig Raine’s novel

In the next issue, which will be dated 23 February, Edward Luttwak on the Iliad; Adam Phillips on autism; Charles Nicholl on the mystery of Andrea del Castagno.

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Jeremy Harding

The Immigration Battle

A young, personable man who speaks fair English, Hamraz had been in Dunkirk for about a month when we met. He was a member of the Afghan National Army, from the district of Azra, south-east of Kabul. Early in 2011, going home on leave, he was called to account by local Taliban as a collaborator and told he would have to take part in a car-bomb attack on a nearby hospital if he wanted to redeem himself. He couldn’t return to his regiment without putting his family at risk and he couldn’t stay in Azra, so he left the country. More


Jenny Diski

The Me Who Knew It

I was in my late thirties before it struck me that there was something odd about the tableau I have in my mind of a familiar living-room, armchair, my father in it, silvery hair, moustache, brown suede lace-ups, and me, aged six or so, sitting on his knee. The layout is correct – I have been back to the block of flats and sat in the living-room of the flat next door, with the same floor plan. Door in the right place; chair I’m sure accurate, a burgundy moquette; patterned carpet; windows looking out onto the brick wall of the offices opposite. More

Perry Anderson

Sino-Americana

Books about China, popular and scholarly, continue to pour off the presses. In this ever expanding literature, there is a subdivision that could be entitled ‘Under Western Eyes’. The larger part of it consists of works that appear to be about China, or some figure or topic from China, but whose real frame of reference, determining the optic, is the United States. Typically written by functionaries of the state, co-opted or career, they have as their underlying question: ‘China – what’s in it for us?’ Rather than Sinology proper, they are Sino-Americana. More

Andrew O’Hagan

At the Olympic Park

Alfred Dickens, the novelist’s brother, wrote a General Board of Health report on the area soon to be occupied by the Olympic athletes, recording that ‘the cholera raged’ and there was ‘neither drainage nor paving’ – ‘in winter the streets were impassable.’ More recently it was a site of old warehouses and weedy dereliction. It smelled of the oil and paint and chemical effluent that had leached for years into the land around the Hackney Marshes. Underneath, there are stones from the Roman road that led from London to Colchester. More

At the MK
Brian Dillon

Short Cuts
Thomas Jones

At the Royal Academy
Daniel Soar


FROM THE ARCHIVE