Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the LRB. His books include Border Vigils: Keeping Migrants Out of the Rich World and Mother Country, a memoir. His essay collection, Analogue Africa: Notes on the Anti-Colonial Imagination, was published in March.
When Casablanca went into production in the spring of 1942, most of Morocco was a French protectorate, administered by the Vichy regime. The film was a hasty project, with excellent anti-Nazi credentials, shot on the cheap – largely at Warner Brothers’ studios in Hollywood.
In the last week of July a guest in our house, an hour’s drive from Bordeaux, was called away to a fire emergency in the Gironde, where things were rapidly getting out of control. A firefighter attached to the French military, he had just lost two colleagues in the civilian service in a fire near the airport: their fire engine was trapped in a stand of blazing pine trees. Within days, it looked as if the western suburbs of Bordeaux were under threat, but by early August the situation in the Gironde was relatively stable, even if the destruction was immense and the prospect of further fires still looms.
Last September Nicolas Sarkozy was found guilty of criminal conspiracy. He went through the gates of La Santé prison in Paris a few weeks later. The judge found that in 2005 he had approved an agreement between his political aides and the Gaddafi regime for massive cash transfers from Libya into his campaign coffers for his crack at the presidency in 2007. Seven other people were...
After Brigitte Bardot’s death in December, the editorial in Paris-Match was desolate: the country had lost ‘its wife, its daughter, its mother, its confidante … its conscience, its Marianne’; French cinema had ‘faded’, no one would again embody ‘liberty and beauty’ as she had; ‘tears will flow.’ Bardot was one of France’s...
Balfour with Jewish settlers in 1925.
Fifteen years ago I was asked by a young Palestinian student at a meeting in Jenin whether, as a British subject, I felt responsible for the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Perhaps it was the translator who introduced the idea of personal responsibility, when the young woman who put the question meant historical. In any case, that’s how I...
Jeremy Harding talks to Tom about the long and resilient reign of King Hassan II of Morocco, and its repressive measures, as described in a new book by Aziz BineBine, who suffered 18 years of brutal detention...
Jeremy Harding discusses the politics of migration.
Elaine Mokhtefi talks to Jeremy Harding about her time working in Algeria in the 1960s when she met Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver.
In his latest book Heaven on Earth art historian T.J. Clark draws on examples from Giotto to Picasso to provide an exciting new history of the depiction of the divine. He talks to LRB contributing editor...
Jeremy Harding and Adam Shatz look back at their pieces for the LRB reporting from North Africa and the Middle East.
Jeremy Harding examines the work of Malian portrait photographer Seydou Keïta and the lively collaboration between himself and his sitters in the years before Mail’s independence.
Jeremy Harding talks about the politics of migration and the battle at Europe’s borders.
‘In olden times, which is when God was deciding what blessings he would give to the countries he was creating, after a long while he finally got to Angola and he asked Gabriel his angel to...
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