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.
Before he ran for the Socialist Party nomination in 2011 François Hollande was an identikit politician: son of a left-wing Catholic mother and avidly right-wing father, degree from Sciences-Po, brilliant énarque, father of four (with Ségolène Royal), bon viveur and party machine man, tracing a line from Mitterrand through Jacques Delors to Lionel Jospin. When Jospin...
In 1974 Ian Berry won a bursary from the Arts Council to photograph ‘the English’. He’d already made his name in South Africa as the only photographer to record the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. Two years later Cartier-Bresson invited him to join Magnum. He went on to work in Vietnam, Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland and Ethiopia; he was in Czechoslovakia in 1968. When the...
What was troubling Julian Assange when he made a dash for friendly extra-territorial space? His detractors argue that it’s the usual story, to do with his propensity to see himself as the centre of the universe, and the target of an improbable plot to lock him up in the US and throw away the key. That last honour has already been bestowed on Bradley Manning. In the leaker, surely, the Americans have their man: why bother with his celebrity publisher?
French voters in London were out in force on 22 April. At the new French school in Kentish Town – primary through lycée, fee-paying – there were four lines of blue and white tape running the length of the courtyard and hundreds of people moving towards the voting booths in a good-natured queue. Outside the gate a graphic designer in her thirties from Limousin said...
In round one of the French presidentials the argument was about the new, dirty style of global capitalism. Could you talk to it or propitiate it or were governments now defenceless creatures in the wild, whose only option was to stay on the run? Once the fringe candidates who wanted France to turn and face it were eliminated, the debate should have moved on to France’s debt. Instead, Sarkozy and Hollande fought about the moral tone of Sarkozy’s presidency (money, friends, influence), ‘Republican values’, nuclear energy, immigration, identity and the ritual preparation of meat. With Hollande’s investiture next week, we’ll be back to the debt. We’re there already.
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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