Jeremy Harding

The return of the bedbug shows no sign of letting up. Unwitting fifth columnists of globalisation, earlier this month they shut down the Nike shop in Manhattan. A friend in Brooklyn says her house was infested. The vector? Probably a son’s wayward friend. Cost in the region of $6000. Orwell used to drive them off with black pepper, which is cheaper. I was last bitten by bedbugs in Fez about 35 years ago and ended up in outpatients. Last, that is, until the bedbug renaissance. Two years ago on a night train from Paris to Florence I was bitten many times. I threw away my clothes, took my travel bag apart and lay down for a week. Six months later in New York, it happened again in a well known hotel on the Lower West Side. It was beginning to seem like a manhunt. I found one of the offenders, put it in a glass and delivered it to reception. In exchange I got a new room. No one offers you a new train.

Murray Sayle, who died on 18 September, began writing for the LRB in his seventies. He’d already been a star turn as a journalist during the great days of the Sunday Times, known for his report that Che Guevara had left Cuba to wage war in South America, his dispatches from Vietnam and his dashing accounts of sailing solo across the Atlantic and tackling Everest. His work for the LRB was an energetic, thoughtful review of the log, with plenty of new material added: on the handover of Hong Kong; on the economic crisis in Japan, where he was living at the time; on climate change and the shortcomings of Kyoto.

A grim truce prevails in my commune, in South-West France, between the travellers who live here – ‘gens du voyage’, ‘Tziganes’, ‘Gitans’ – and the indigenous French. The expulsions (none in these parts) have changed little. Like most truces that work, it’s founded on lack of trust and there are any number of assertions doing the rounds. A favourite is that out of fear for their own families, police don’t intervene when crimes are committed by travellers. Last year I was tending the bar at a fundraiser when a fight erupted at the door. A friend was badly injured. As it happened, and it often does, the incident involved travellers. The gendarmes were slow to fetch up but quick, in the weeks that followed, to pursue their suspects.

The cost of eating and drinking is rising. Breweries and beeries won’t feel the recent increase in barley prices as fast as farmers will: those who use it for animal feed have already seen the price of a bushel of non-malted barley (about 22 kg) double since the end of June. Bad weather in Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, which between them take half the world’s barley to market, is the cause. The rise pushes up the price of grains in general and hits us all eventually, but the hit is staggered. In rich countries we spend less than one fifth of our income on food; in developing countries the figure is more like a half or three-quarters. The gap is narrowing as the value of food appreciates all over the world.

Mia Farrow is still a star turn. See her testimony at The Hague, where Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, is on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity in neighbouring Sierra Leone. Farrow, Naomi Campbell and Campbell’s agent, Carole White, of Premier Model Management, were in South Africa in 1997 when, according to White and Farrow, Campbell was a knowing beneficiary of Taylor’s dodgy largesse. Here’s how it looks, very roughly, if you dovetail the testimonies of White, Farrow and Campbell at the Special Court for Sierra Leone: