Who’s your dance partner?

Thomas Meaney: Europe inside Africa, 7 November 2019

The Scramble for Europe: Young Africa on Its Way to the Old Continent 
by Stephen Smith.
Polity, 197 pp., £15.99, April 2019, 978 1 5095 3457 9
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... the first major conference of European leaders after the start of the so-called migration crisis – Niger’s president, Mahamadou Issoufou, presented a set of measures he would undertake to keep refugees from Niger out of Europe. The plan was designed by a group of European consultants he had hired as part of a ...

When a Corpse Is a Message

Álvaro Enrigue: Mexico’s Cartels, 8 May 2014

Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers 
by Anabel Hernández, translated by Iain Bruce.
Verso, 362 pp., £16.99, September 2013, 978 1 78168 073 5
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ZeroZeroZero 
by Roberto Saviano.
Feltrinelli, 444 pp., £23, March 2013, 978 88 07 03053 6
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Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter’s Journey through a Country’s Descent into Darkness 
by Alfredo Corchado.
Penguin, 248 pp., £17, May 2013, 978 1 59420 439 5
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... cent, and his party hadn’t won a majority in either chamber – at the cost of transforming a group of criminals into enemy combatants, a status they had never aspired to. Above all, Calderón’s gesture had turned vast areas of the country into rebellious territories over which the government no longer had any influence. The president’s declaration ...

Look at Don Juan

Adam Shatz: Camus in the New World, 19 October 2023

Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World 
by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan, translated by Ryan Bloom.
Chicago, 152 pp., £16.99, March 2023, 978 0 226 69495 5
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... preening is a relief. Although novels of ideas such as L’Étranger and La Peste brought Camus international renown, their success led him, and others, to misjudge his gifts. Ideas – his ticket to Left Bank intellectual circles – were never really his strong suit. He was a Mediterranean writer whose flair lay in his rapturous, often elegiac ...

How bad can it get?

LRB Contributors: On Johnson’s Britain, 15 August 2019

... into a mutually reinforcing and enriching economic bloc, finally capable of standing up to their international competitors (which had long since put up their own tariffs while ruthlessly exploiting Britain’s openness and good nature). Chamberlain guaranteed that as a result British industry would be rebuilt, unemployment reduced, and new forms of social ...

Shahdenfreude

Robert Graham, 19 June 1980

The Fall of the Shah 
by Fereydoun Hoveyda.
Weidenfeld, 166 pp., £6.95, January 1980, 9780297777229
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The Fall of the Peacock Throne 
by William Forbis.
Harper and Row, 305 pp., £6.95, April 1980, 0 06 337008 5
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... Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the former Shah of Iran, haunts the international stage like a latter-day Lear. In the loneliness of his exile he is bitter about his former allies and still incredulous at the way his throne was ripped from under him, his dream of Iran as a world power shattered by revolution and an Islamic republic brought into being ...

Our Credulous Grammarian

Adewale Maja-Pearce: Soyinka’s Dubious Friendships, 2 August 2007

You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir 
by Wole Soyinka.
Methuen, 626 pp., £18.99, May 2007, 978 0 413 77628 0
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... opprobrium following the 1995 judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa, appeared to have persuaded the international community to accept his transmutation into an elected civilian president, through the five political parties he had created and funded for that purpose. Soyinka believed that his own presence on Nigerian soil, where he would make occasional ...

Lunchtime No News

Paul Foot, 27 June 1991

Kill the messenger 
by Bernard Ingham.
HarperCollins, 408 pp., £17.50, May 1991, 0 00 215944 9
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... to the Guardian newspaper. In 1986, if Bernard Ingham’s book is to be believed, during the crisis about the Westland helicopter company, Leon Brittan, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, allowed his head of information, Collette Bowe, to read out to the Press Association a letter from the Solicitor-General to the selfsame Secretary of State for ...

The Strange Death of Mehmet Shehu

Jon Halliday, 9 October 1986

... long-time premier Mehmet Shehu had committed suicide the previous night ‘in a moment of nervous crisis’. Although suicide is generally frowned on in the Communist countries – who, after all, could possibly wish to depart from paradise? – the radio referred to Shehu as ‘comrade’ and gave him his full ritual titles. Nearly one year later Albania’s ...

Overtaken by Events

Avi Shlaim, 30 November 1995

Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land 
by Meron Benvenisti.
California, 260 pp., £20, September 1995, 0 520 08567 1
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... An interstate dispute is conducted by the representatives of sovereign states within a defined international framework and in accordance with well-established rules of diplomatic practice. A precondition for negotiations is recognition of the legitimacy and equality of the representatives of the other state. The subject of negotiation is not the status of ...

Diary

Thomas de Waal: War in the North Caucasus, 3 November 2005

... Partly it is the consequence of Chechen fighters seeking safer havens outside Chechnya. The crisis is worst in North Ossetia, the republic with the biggest Christian population and strongest loyalty to Moscow. Its capital, Vladikavkaz, is a fine old garrison town stretched along the River Terek and a major industrial centre. It used to be the nearest ...

Don’t Go to the Doctor

Karma Nabulsi: Snitching on Students, 18 May 2017

... Colonel Chuck Cardinal, the director of the US Army Pacific Command’s inter-agency co-ordination group for counter-terrorism, who suggested that ‘Islamic extremists’ are like icebergs, floating, and mostly submerged, in a sea of ‘moderate Muslims’. So how are we supposed to spot them?There is no comprehensive list of possible indicators that someone ...

An Invertebrate Left

Perry Anderson, 12 March 2009

... ultimate political victory. This was not what Gramsci had believed. A revolutionary of the Third International, he had never thought capital could be broken without force of arms, however important the need to win the widest popular consent for the overthrow of the ruling order. But it fitted the idealist cast of the culture at large. Within the intellectual ...

Diary

Perry Anderson: In Seoul, 17 October 1996

... imagined to be a lesser variant of the Japanese record, or simply a local version of a larger group that includes Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. In reality, the experience of South Korea is unique. No other society in the world has industrialised in depth as fast. A historical process that took at least three generations in Japan has here been ...

It’s Finished

John Lanchester: The Banks, 28 May 2009

... question is something of a non-story. We are exposed to such gigantic losses through the financial crisis that it doesn’t really matter if Sir Fred spends the rest of his life bathing in Cristal at our expense. The question of his pension has become a synecdoche for the more general issue of City bonuses, which to the City are a normal fact of life but to ...

Praise Hayek and pass the ammunition

John Lloyd, 24 February 1994

The Fate of Marxism in Russia 
by Alexander Yakovlev, translated by Catherine Fitzpatrick.
Yale, 250 pp., £19.95, October 1993, 0 300 05365 7
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Politics and Society in Russia 
by Richard Sakwa.
Routledge, 518 pp., £40, September 1993, 0 415 09540 9
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... economy to improve this year or next, and since any effective remedy will deepen the short-term crisis, the strain can only get worse, and will perhaps become unbearable, I need hardly add that this is a very serious position to be in, since the next few months are likely to determine whether or not the conflict now evident at the perimeters of the former ...