The place is in ruins. A mangled refinery is now a playground, municipal buildings and schools have been flattened, but the people keep moving, and the killers – insurgents, soldiers, militias, bandits...
R.W. Johnson is a long-standing contributor to the LRB. His first appearance was on the letters page in 1981, where he took ‘mild issue’ with a review of his most celebrated book,
Timothy Snyder, a historian of Modern Eastern Europe at Yale and the most rhetorically gifted defender of the anti-Russian US foreign policy establishment, must have been rubbing his eyes in...
To restrain the competitiveness of German industries in order to save the single currency, as outsiders sometimes suggest, would from the perspective of the unions be committing suicide for fear of death.
When Donald Trump pledged, during his presidential campaign, to ‘begin building a wall’ along the US-Mexican border he was promising to create something that already existed. At...
How to explain Poland’s swing against the European Union? How to explain the election of the Catholic fundamentalist, authoritarian, populist, Eurosceptic Law and Justice Party to rule a...
Inevitably, the first thing I did when I got my copy of the one-volume edition of The Benn Diaries (Hutchinson, £30) was to look up Jeremy Corbyn in the index. He appears about as often...
A friend who lives in the North and works in an EU-funded community centre in the South said she fears the return of the border to the minds of the people. The old questions. Who are you? Where are you...
Reactions by the international commentariat to Trump and Netanyahu’s joint press conference on 15 February focused largely on Trump’s pronouncements, specifically on what seemed to...
More often than we may realise, and in sometimes quite shocking ways, we are still using Greek idioms to represent the idea of women in, and out of, power.
Defeat, for the left, is once again a badge of honour. It may also be a relief. Hollande has bequeathed nothing for a new administration of the left to build on.
In his monumental biography of De Gaulle, Jean Lacouture describes a meeting of the Free French in London in 1941 at which several of the younger members expressed their admiration for...
Adam Shatz’s article in this issue first appeared on the LRB blog. You can read it here.
‘Honourable was the swift and timely aid offered to them in their struggle by the West,’ the Times said of the Libyan rebels who rose up against Gaddafi during the Arab Spring in 2011;...
‘Argo fuck yourself.’ The line is repeated several times in Ben Affleck’s 2012 historical spy thriller, Argo. Based on the memoir by Tony Mendez, a CIA agent, the movie...
The fighting that began in Aleppo on 19 July 2012 lasted four years, five months and three days, killing more than thirty thousand people – almost three times the number killed in the...
What to make of him? The man is a shock, like the toy buzzer in a prank handshake, and the effect is to baffle and immobilise thought.
Early in 2014, the Bank of England put out a quarterly bulletin entitled ‘Money Creation in the Modern Economy’ which put to bed one of the most persistent – and false...