R.W. Johnson was a fellow in politics at Magdalen College, Oxford for many years before returning to South Africa, where he was brought up, in 1995. His books include The Long March of the French Left, How Long Will South Africa Survive? and Look Back in Laughter: Oxford’s Postwar Golden Age. He died in July 2026 at the age of 82.
On 2 February 1940, Guy Liddell, MI5’s director of counter-espionage, wrote in his diary:
An elderly statesman with gout When asked what the war was about In a written reply Said ‘My colleagues and I Are doing our best to find out’
A not inapposite comment on the Phoney War (and we learn from Liddell that there was a good deal of hidden last-minute talk between Chamberlain...
“In the violent farm occupations that followed the February 2000 vote, the media generally focused on the attack on the four thousand white farmers. A far more significant target were the 2.2 million farmworkers, who were made to sing Zanu-PF songs, beaten and tortured and then dumped at the roadside, traumatised and, as it were, re-peasantised. Of those who did not flee to surrounding countries, most will have had to return to subsistence agriculture and are vulnerable to food-for-votes blackmail. The Murambatsvina is the application to the urban environment of the same strategy: urban political dissidents are being punished for their views and driven into the countryside, where those who survive will be brutally ‘re-educated’ in the ways of single partyism. It is as pointless to expect mass popular resistance to this as it was to expect the Irish to rise up during the Great Hunger.”
In the spring of 1974, as reports multiplied of his involvement with crooks such as John Poulson and T. Dan Smith, Reginald Maudling disappeared to Paris with his wife, Beryl. The Daily Mail’s Harry Longmuir had little difficulty locating him in the ‘Président’ suite of the George V. Checking in himself, Longmuir spent a whole Sunday morning with a confused,...
Growing up in Durban in the 1950s, I could see how keen Coloured and Indian cricketers were, how much everything was tilted against them and, at the same time, how good white South African cricket was. Take the schoolboy generation I saw rising around me. Playing against Hilton College, I came up against Hylton Ackerman and Mike Procter – the latter opening both the batting and bowling...
R .W. Johnson is a long-standing contributor to the LRB. His first appearance was on the letters page in 1981, where he took ‘mild issue’ with a review of his most celebrated book,
Anyone in South Africa, white or black, rich or poor, who reads R.W. Johnson’s new book could be forgiven for rushing to the airport. It’s a familiar tale of African hopelessness,...
This Johnson is an energetic essayist. His energy is not simply physical, though he has plenty of that: it is mental too. He seems to write quickly – how else the productivity? – but...
Profound embarrassment has greeted the publication of R.W. Johnson’s book on the shooting-down of a Korean airliner over Russian airspace. Even its serialisation in the Sunday Telegraph...
As late as 1951, the British economy was the strongest in Western Europe. Only the wartime neutrals, Sweden and Switzerland, surpassed us in income per head. In his magisterial new history of the...
‘Is it easy to be a Marxist?’ Louis Althusser put this question to a crowded audience at the University of Picardy in 1975. Is it possible to be an Althusserian? The question has to...
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