Mihir Bose
Big Bad Wolf
Threat from the East?
By Fred Halliday
Penguin Books 149pp £1.75 order from our bookshop
The Afghan Syndrome
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
Croom Helm 296pp £12.95 order from our bookshop
Roots of Confrontation in South Asia
By Stanley Wolpert
Oxford University Press 222pp £10.50 order from our bookshop
The jacket of Fred Halliday’s book shows a photograph of a characteristic group of Islamic Afghan rebels, sub-machine guns and rifles in hand, standing atop a captured Soviet armoured vehicle, east of Kabul. It is probably the most potent image of that country – one that has been effectively propagandized in the West ever since that ‘small far away country of which we know little’ was thrust into our headlines by the Soviet invasion of the country in Christmas 1979. We all like to be on the side of the goodies even if they are quite as obscurantist and impossible as the Afghan rebels, and the Soviet ‘Vietnam’ has provided a field day for creative journalism of the most remarkable kind.
Among western foreign journalists it symbolises virility to sneak into Afghanistan from the rebel side and photograph the guerilla war, and for a few months after the Russian intervention New Delhi’s Palam airport was a second home for some of the leading Fleet Street experts on South Asia. Rather charmingly they were reported to be always predicting the next Russian moves on the basis of ‘travellers’’ tales from Kabul, which subsequent events invariably proved to be the fanciful hopes of
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'It’s long been known that there is an optimum reproductive window and that women enjoy a considerably shorter one than men. For both sexes this window is opening and closing earlier than it used to.' (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-end-of-babies
Sixty years ago today, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter outer space. @Andrew_Crumey looks at his role in the space race.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/one-giant-leap-for-mankind
On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match