Diary

Jonathan Steele: In Syria, 22 March 2012

... and the Arab League was the best news Syria’s silent majority has had for months. In spite of Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric, Washington may be backing away from demanding Assad’s resignation. The signs are that the US and the Arab League fear that to support the opposition is to encourage the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis. ...

Sisyphus at the Selectric

James Wolcott: Undoing Philip Roth, 20 May 2021

Philip Roth: The Biography 
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021, 978 0 224 09817 5
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Philip Roth: A Counterlife 
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021, 978 0 19 984610 8
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Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth 
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020, 978 0 525 50524 2
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... move. One of the crisper exchanges in The Biography occurs when Roth offers to help Chelsea Clinton with any papers she might write about his work, and Hillary shoots back: ‘She doesn’t need any help.’ Hillary really should have been president.Later in life Roth would lament ...