Rise of the Rest

Pankaj Mishra: After America, 6 November 2008

The Post-American World 
by Fareed Zakaria.
Allen Lane, 292 pp., £20, July 2008, 978 1 84614 153 9
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The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order 
by Parag Khanna.
Allen Lane, 466 pp., £25, April 2008, 978 0 7139 9937 2
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... from Henry Kissinger which also proposed Zakaria as America’s first Muslim secretary of state. Tina Brown called him ‘New York’s hot brainiac of choice’. Zakaria’s article appeared during the moment of primitive fury that overcame even ‘liberal’ commentators. Amid the clamour for retribution, Zakaria sounded calm and judicious. Read ...

Four Poems

Tom Paulin, 23 May 1985

... and the kids feel righteous – righteous but cosy. A Walk to Pubble Shrub Gardens for John and Tina McClelland This fawn plastic box contains my archive, a ghat of paper I set single words on like a loyal wife who must turn to ash and bone out of love. It’s the grist, I lie to them, for a curt essay on the Girondins whom of course I condemn – a ...

Air-Conditioned Unease

Andrew O’Hagan: Joan Didion on the Couch, 26 June 2025

Notes to John 
by Joan Didion.
Fourth Estate, 208 pp., £18.99, April, 978 0 00 876724 2
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Didion & Babitz 
by Lili Anolik.
Atlantic, 344 pp., £10.99, July, 978 1 80546 394 8
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The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir 
by Griffin Dunne.
Grove, 385 pp., £10.99, June 2024, 978 1 80471 057 9
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The Uptown Local: Joy, Death and Joan Didion 
by Cory Leadbeater.
Fleet, 213 pp., £12.99, June 2024, 978 0 349 12717 0
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... seem to the reader part of a pattern, a story of America and celebrity in the late 20th century. Tina Brown asked Dominique’s father, Dominic (Nick) Dunne, to write about the trial of the man who killed her, setting him on a new career as Vanity Fair’s special correspondent on meurtriers célèbres. In Graydon Carter’s recent memoir, we hear of ...

Hogshit and Chickenshit

Michael Rogin, 1 August 1996

Washington Babylon 
by Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein.
Verso, 316 pp., £31.95, May 1996, 1 85984 092 2
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... pulled in $45,000. Readers out of sympathy with Diane Sawyer, and who relish the depiction of Tina Brown’s New Yorker as a salon for the rich and famous, may still feel that Washington Babylon gives equal opportunity for women a bad name. Dismissing the difference made by the President’s Supreme Court appointments, Cockburn and Silverstein worry ...

Why do white people like what I write?

Pankaj Mishra: Ta-Nehisi Coates, 22 February 2018

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy 
by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Hamish Hamilton, 367 pp., £16.99, October 2017, 978 0 241 32523 0
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... liberals – who did so much to create a climate of opinion and a legal regime in which black and brown bodies could be seized, broken and destroyed outside all norms and laws of war – are coming to grips with ‘America’s Original Sin: Slavery and the Legacy of White Supremacy’ (an unlikely recent headline in Foreign Affairs). Back in the early 2000s ...

What you can get away with

James Wolcott: Updike Reconsidered, 19 February 2026

John Updike: A Life in Letters 
by John Updike, edited by James Schiff.
Hamish Hamilton, 874 pp., £40, November 2025, 978 0 241 70758 6
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... indignity of finding himself on the outs, though the perpetual honeymoon had its bumpy patches. Tina Brown’s Batmobile arrival from Vanity Fair to assume the editorship in 1992 initially proved trying. When her appointment was announced to much fanfare and baying at the moon, Updike didn’t huff off like Garrison Keillor, who packed up his desk and ...

Move Your Head and the Picture Changes

Jenny Turner: Helen DeWitt, 11 September 2008

Your Name Here 
by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff.
helendewitt.com, 580 pp., £8, May 2008
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... airport paperback – one has Pity the Nation, another has Harry Potter, another has Dan Brown. But the texts keep morphing into Arabic in front of the readers’ eyes: انجيلينا   Angelina بانانا   Banana تيتيكاكا   Titicaca ‘All the travellers’ books, to their great consternation, are intruded upon by the Arabic ...