An Unreliable Friend

From the LRB letters page: [ 16 September 1999 ] Anthony Sampson [ 30 September 1999 ] Anthony Lewis, R.W. Johnson [ 28 October 1999 ] Anthony Lewis, V.M. Hunt, David Brokensha, Oleg Gordievsky [ 11 November 1999 ] Paul Trewhela, R.W. Johnson [ 25 November 1999 ] Iain Edwards, David Dyzenhaus [ 9 December 1999 ] Anthony Sampson, Lionel (Rusty) Bernstein [ 20 January 2000 ] Neil Wilson, Paul Trewhela [ 16 March 2000 ] John Kane-Berman, Christine Sypnowich.

R.W. Johnson, an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, lives in Cape Town, where he is completing a book on South Africa since the advent of democracy.

Other articles by this contributor:

How Mugabe came to power · R.W. Johnson talks to Wilfred Mhanda

Cads · Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico.

Her Boy · Mark Thatcher

Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone · Major and Lamont

Mr Shepperd to you · Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 by Ross McKibbin

Burning Blankets · Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up

Rogue’s Paradise · The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova

Where do we go from here? · Zimbabwe