Letter
Mistakes
9 October 2003
The state of Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) was declared in December 1971, not 1974 as Sukhdev Sandhu suggests (LRB, 9 October).
Fatema Ahmed
Fatema Ahmed is deputy editor of Apollo.
Full of Hell: James Salter
Fatema Ahmed, 5 February 2004
In his memoir, Burning the Days (1997), James Salter tells a story about an encounter between William Faulkner and an officer from the local airbase in Greenville, Mississippi in the early 1950s. They talk of the excitement of flying, and Faulkner drunkenly reminisces about his days as a pilot in France during the First World War. He then offers to write a story about the Air Force in...
Letter
Elephants in the Scherzo
6 October 2005
E.M. Forster is not always as facetious as Frank Kermode says he is (LRB, 6 October). The description of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in Howards End may be ‘an embarrassing couple of pages’ but it’s unlikely that Forster is ‘gently sneering at people who profess to like music without knowing how to do so’. Everything else he wrote about music suggests that he really was the kind of listener...
No snarling: P.G. Wodehouse
Fatema Ahmed, 3 November 2005
On my father’s bookshelves, tucked between yet another novel by Somerset Maugham and J.B. Priestley’s account of a journey to Mexico with his archaeologist wife, was a copy of Carry On, Jeeves. I had never heard of P.G. Wodehouse and racing through these stories of a master and his manservant I was surprised to find that, so far as I could tell, they were seriously funny and...
From The Blog
9 April 2010
The highlight of the April issue of Cahiers du Cinéma is an interview with Slavoj Žižek. Following up on a piece he wrote about Avatar, reprinted in the March issue of Cahiers, he confesses to his interviewers that he hasn’t seen the film; as a good Lacanian, the idea is enough, and we must trust theory. Žižek promises that he will see the film and then write a Stalinist ‘self-criticism’.
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