The Editors

From Chimamanda Adichie's review of There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe (LRB, 11 October 2012): He began to write Things Fall Apart after a British lecturer told him an earlier story he had written lacked ‘form’, but was then unable to explain to him what form meant.

Last week we asked the Wu Ming Foundation to write a piece on Beppe Grillo and the Movimento 5 Stelle. Unhappy with the way we edited it, they withdrew it (with regrets on both sides but no bad feeling on either) and published it on their blog. You can read 'Grillismo: Yet another right-wing cult coming out of Italy' here.

Richard Gott on meeting Hugo Chávez a year after he came to power (LRB, 17 February 2000): When I was first taken to meet him last month at La Casona, the Presidential residence in Caracas that his troops had once tried and failed to seize, he was standing in the garden with his back to me, gazing out towards the small forest of bamboos and palms fringing the far end of the lawn.

There's an exhibition of Peter Campbell's watercolours at City Gallery Wellington until 16 April. 'The exhibition brings together 36 paintings... acknowledging their other life – as images that exist before and beyond the relatively brief currency of the fortnightly review.'

Michael Wood on Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln (LRB, 20 December 2012): The film would be worth seeing for this performance alone. All the apparatus of a Lincoln portrait is in place, as it would have to be: the beard, the stoop, the hat, the long coat. It’s a bit like putting together a kit for dressing up as Groucho Marx.