R.W. Johnson

From The Blog

Mr Blair goes to Astana

11 July 2012

The Financial Times entitled its recent lengthy interview with Tony Blair 'Waiting in the Wings'. Blair, though claiming to be all-consumed by his current Middle East job, also declared himself ready to drop it like a hot brick if only someone would offer him the top job at the EU, the IMF or the World Bank. He angrily dismissed the notion that he wanted to be rich – he's earning £20 million a year – and said the whole point 'is not to make money, it's to make a difference'.

Letter

Military Catch-Up

5 April 2012

David French compares the battles of Isandhlwana (1879) and Maiwand (1880), where the British were worsted by the Zulus and Afghan tribesmen respectively (LRB, 5 April). As he says, these triumphs over modern armies caused a sensation, though neither of them quite as much as the similar defeat of Western arms at the Battle of Little Bighorn a few years earlier (1876). The key to these defeats lay in...

Letter

US Electoral Arithmetic

20 October 2011

Charles Coutinho challenges what I say about the importance of the black vote to Truman’s victory in 1948 and JFK’s in 1960 (Letters, 9 February). He is right, of course, that black voters were nothing like as numerous in 1948 as they were later but I would still say their vote was decisive. The 1948 election, which Truman won by 303 electoral college votes to 189, turned on just three states:...

Angry White Men: Obama’s Electoral Arithmetic

R.W. Johnson, 20 October 2011

Running for Congress in Louisiana in 1961, Joe Waggonner, a conservative Democrat and militant segregationist, faced a tough challenge from the Republican candidate, a wealthy oilman called Charlton Lyons. Waggonner came up with a novel – and winning – argument: he warned that electing Lyons would help bring about a competitive two-party system in which a contest could easily be...

Post-Post-Struggle: South Africa’s Elections

R.W. Johnson, 19 May 2011

If the polls are right, the ANC will suffer its worst ever electoral reverse in the local elections due to be held in South Africa on 18 May. The main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, seems poised to win not only Cape Town, its main base, but to gain seats right across the country. In the Western Cape the DA will probably win a majority of towns and cities; it will make inroads in...

See more Show oldest

Bristling Ermine: R.W. Johnson

Jeremy Harding, 4 May 2017

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,

Could it have been different? R.W. Johnson’s South Africa

Roger Southall, 8 October 2009

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,...

Making things happen

Ross McKibbin, 26 July 1990

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...

The scandal that never was

Paul Foot, 24 July 1986

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...

Downhill

David Marquand, 19 September 1985

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...

Althusser’s Fate

Douglas Johnson, 16 April 1981

‘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...

More search Options

Browse by Subject