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Such amateurishness …

Neal Ascherson: The Sufferings of a Young Nazi, 30 April 2009

The Kindly Ones 
by Jonathan Littell, translated by Charlotte Mandell.
Chatto, 984 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 0 7011 8165 9
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... who had worked at Auschwitz, some of them prisoners and others SS medical officers on the camp staff. No research comes closer to answering the ‘How could they have?’ question. In the course of the book, Lifton defined two mental strategies adopted by the SS doctors in order to distance themselves from what they were doing and seeing. He called the ...

Those Streets Over There

John Connelly: The Warsaw Rising, 24 June 2004

Rising ’44: ‘The Battle for Warsaw’ 
by Norman Davies.
Pan, 752 pp., £9.99, June 2004, 0 330 48863 5
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... history of the 1944 rising. In it, he traces the fateful call to arms to two men: Leopold Okulicki and Tadeusz Pelczynski, Polish generals who met on 21 July 1944 in a flat in Warsaw. Radio stations were just broadcasting news of the failed attempt on Hitler’s life; Allied and Soviet armies were advancing quickly on Germany. The Nazi regime ...

Nodding and Winking

Stephen W. Smith: Françafrique, 11 February 2010

... to a post-colonial godfather. ‘Do you really think Ali could lose the election?’ I’d asked a staff sergeant at the Doussala border checkpoint. ‘Of course I do! Many people hate him.’ This was three weeks in advance of an unprecedentedly open election: for the first time since Gabon’s independence from France in 1960, there was no incumbent ...

Chop-Chop Spirit

Sean Jacobs: Festac ’77 Revisited, 9 May 2024

Last Day in Lagos 
by Marilyn Nance, edited by Oluremi C. Onabanjo.
Fourthwall, 299 pp., £37.50, October 2022, 978 0 9947009 9 5
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... festival, but seven months later, he was assassinated in another attempted coup and his chief of staff, Olusegun Obasanjo, took power.Obasanjo’s tenure coincided with huge economic growth in Nigeria: between 1960 and 1973 oil output increased from five million to more than six hundred million barrels. By 1971, when it joined OPEC, Nigeria was the world’s ...

Poison is better

Kevin Okoth: Africa’s Cold War, 15 June 2023

White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa 
by Susan Williams.
Hurst, 651 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 1 78738 555 9
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Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-75 
by Natalia Telepneva.
North Carolina, 302 pp., £37.95, June, 978 1 4696 6586 3
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... too easy,’ Gizenga complained. They were furious when Mobutu was appointed chief of staff to the Armée Nationale Congolaise.Before long, Lumumba’s enemies closed in: on 5 September, Kasavubu illegally dismissed Lumumba as prime minister, citing his decision to involve the Soviets in Katanga. Gizenga, too, was dismissed. When Lumumba was later ...

Where Life Is Seized

Adam Shatz: Frantz Fanon’s Revolution, 19 January 2017

Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté 
by Frantz Fanon, edited by Robert Young and Jean Khalfa.
La Découverte, 688 pp., £22, October 2015, 978 2 7071 8638 6
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... neither a Muslim ‘native’ nor a white European, Fanon stood at a lonely remove from both the staff and the residents at Blida. He was also a colonial administrator, as Macey observes, occupying ‘the traditional position of the black citizen from an “old colony” with a civilising mission to perform among the North African or black African subjects ...

An UnAmerican in New York

Lewis Nkosi: The Harlem Renaissance, 24 August 2000

Winds Can Wake Up the Dead: An Eric Walrond Reader 
edited by Louis Parascandola.
Wayne State, 350 pp., $24.95, December 1998, 0 8143 2709 5
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... and editor of the Negro weekly, the Brooklyn and Long Island Informer. Later he joined the staff of Opportunity, on which he also served as business manager. For a short while he flirted with Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement. He was the recipient of two major awards, a Harmon and a Guggenheim, which he used to travel widely in ...

One day I’ll tell you what I think

Adam Shatz: Sartre in Cairo, 22 November 2018

No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonisation 
by Yoav Di-Capua.
Chicago, 355 pp., £26, March 2018, 978 0 226 50350 9
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The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student-Movement Generation in Egypt 
by Arwa Salih, translated by Samah Selim.
Seagull, 163 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 0 85742 483 9
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... fascist I ever met’. He cancelled a meeting with Yitzhak Rabin, then the army chief of staff, protesting that ‘I came to meet the people, the left and civil society, not the military. Besides, I had already spent an excellent evening with this fascist general!’ He even stood up David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state, while missing none of ...

I only want the OM

Christopher Tayler: Somerset Maugham, 1 September 2005

Somerset Maugham: A Life 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Vintage, 411 pp., £12, April 2005, 1 4000 3052 8
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... In 1926, he bought the Villa Mauresque – the original structure was built in 1906 by Leopold II of Belgium for his personal confessor – and settled in France. Syrie stayed in London, where she was taking a profitable interest in interior design (a reliable mark of bad character in her husband’s later books). They were divorced in ...

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