The Editors

Just in from Cape, an advance proof copy of The Twelve Children of Paris, the second part of Tim Willocks's Mattias Tannhauser trilogy (out in May). The novel opens on St Bartholomew's Eve 1572. We especially look forward to reading about the 'de-limbings'.

The first issue of the New York Review of Books was published 50 years ago today, with contributions from F.W. Dupee, Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, Marcy McCarthy, Philip Rahv, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, John Berryman, Elizabeth Hardwick, Oscar Gass, W.H. Auden, James R. Newman, Nicola Chiaromonte, Lionel Abel, Steven Marcus, Robert Penn Warren, Irving Howe, Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin, John Maddocks, R.W. Flint, William Meredith, Adrienne Rich, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Miller, Barbara Probst Solomon, Lewis A. Coser, John Hollander, William Phillips, John Thompson, Robert Jay Lifton, Midge Decter, David T. Bazelon, Marius Bewley, Dennis H. Wrong, Norman Mailer, James Ackerman, Richard Poirier, Jason Epstein, Nathan P. Glazer, William Styron and Gore Vidal.

David Runciman on Lance Armstrong in the LRB, 22 November 2012: Blood-doping was what gave Armstrong a shot at becoming one of the legends of the sport. But it is clear that in his own mind what made the difference was how he doped: he simply did it better than anyone else, more creatively, more ruthlessly, more fearlessly. He exploited the same opportunities that were available to everyone. For Armstrong, drugs added an extra element of competition to the sport: the competition to be the person who made best use of the drugs.

Bruce Whitehouse in the LRB, 30 August 2012: What does Mali’s spectacular slide from celebrated democratic model to failed state augur for the rest of Africa? The number of electoral democracies on the continent has fallen from 24 to 19 in the last seven years. It may be that Mali is a portent of state collapse to come, as the façade of democracy erodes, exposing the informal government mechanisms that really run the show. What if, as the historian Stephen Ellis has argued, the increasing fragility of African states is ‘an early sign of a wider problem with the system of international governance’ built after World War Two? Western powers are discovering that in Africa, as in Afghanistan, there are limits to their ability to impose or even reform state systems.

The New York Times is reporting the death of Jean S. Harris, 'Killer of Scarsdale Diet Doctor'. Anita Brookner wrote about 'Mrs Harris' in the LRB of 6 May 1982: Mrs Jean Harris, a trim widow of 56, was a woman who had reason to congratulate herself on making a success of her life. She had risen from undistinguished but respectable suburban beginnings to the position of headmistress of the select Madeira School for girls, in McLean, Virginia. She had married young and had two fine sons. She had kept her looks, and, apart from the occasional bout of depression or fatigue, her health.