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.
Writing about Basil Davidson’s work for the LRB blog a few days after his death last month, I’d a sense that there was more to say. The record is magnificent: his sterling work in occupied Yugoslavia for the Special Operations Executive during the war, his books about this period, and then, famously, the histories of precolonial Africa and the writings on the anti-colonial...
Basil Davidson, who died last week at the age of 95, was a regular contributor to the LRB during the 1990s. In a generous sheaf of pieces, many of them reviews, he drew on his experiences as a member of Special Operations Executive during the war and his subsequent fascination with Africa. He was fond of exposition and argument, but his writing could be pithy too. On the postcolonial state in Africa: ‘a constitutional garbage can of shattered loyalties’. On Milosevic and the break-up of Yugoslavia: ‘the Chetniks . . . have appeared once more.' On intrepid writers pursuing their quarry in distant places: ‘Those who wander in the great forests of the African tropics do not always manage, like Conrad’s storyteller, to make it home again.’
My English teacher used to disparage Caroline Spurgeon. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us was too systematic for the honest amateur with dottle in his ashtray, the sort who took his pupils through Antony and Cleopatra in the morning and watched from his shooting stick as they toiled at sports in the afternoon. Still, you can make a case for treating Shakespeare as a force of...
When food experts speak about ‘resilience’, they are expressing concern about the hair-trigger system of delivery in Britain. Supermarkets are the genii of the logistics game: barcodes going through the checkout enable a precision-picture of the state of the shelves in any given outlet and trip the switch for incoming orders, which arrive ‘just in time’: the process is so finely tuned that most of the warehousing a supermarket chain requires can be handled by a fleet of lorries plying our motorways round the clock. In the new thinking, this is cutting it fine, like only ever refilling the tank of your car with a couple of litres: it works as long as there’s nothing you hadn’t thought of, but it also means that Britain is never much further than ‘nine meals from anarchy’, as Andrew Simms, head of the New Economics Foundation, put it.
Flying is for happening people and though I try to happen as seldom as possible, sometimes it’s irresistible, which is why I’m booked to fly any moment with RyanAir. First time in eight years, even though the airport’s up the road. But then along comes Eyjafjallajökull, east of Stansted. East in the same way that Krakatoa is ‘east’ of Java, i.e. west. On the RyanAir website I can see the company ‘apologises sincerely for any inconvenience caused by these eruptions’. At least I think that’s what it says. But that doesn’t address my sense of entitlement, which includes the right to travel unimpeded by natural phenomena, e.g. fog, snow, volcanoes, meteorite showers, Canada geese and flying toads.
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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