Christopher Hitchens
Chronicles of Revolution
Under the Skin: The Death of White Rhodesia
By David Caute
Allen Lane 416pp £14.95 order from our bookshop
During the last all-white election in Rhodesia, over which Ian Smith presided in 1977, I went to pay a call on Sir Roy Welensky. The old boy sat in his garden in the suburbs of Salisbury, where an enormous tortoise from the Seychelle Islands was inching about, and talked about the way in which the Rhodesian Front party had colonised the minds of his fellow Europeans. Welensky was a leathery old Tory, with a long record of tough right-wing politics in the old Central African Federation. But he had come to detest racialism and the ruinous war it had brought on the country. ‘It’s always seemed very simple to me’, he said. ‘If you don’t like black men, don’t come and live in Africa.’ I thought then, and I think now, that this was rather a sound point. It used to get one down, hearing red-faced men in bars shouting about how ‘we’ built up this country and weren’t about to give it away to a lot of shiftless ‘Afs’. At least as often as not, one would find that the speaker had left Leamington Spa about five years ago to escape ‘socialist Britain’.
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
@zevin_a 'has produced a lively account of the many disagreements (often fierce) that lay, and lie, behind the seemingly confident assertions that appear in print.'
@williamkeegan on the secrets of 'The Economist'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gunboat-journalism
We're delighted to be partnering the @royalacademy to offer one winner a year's free subscription to Literary Review and a year's RA Friends membership.
Enter by clicking the link below. You have until midday on 18th December - good luck!
http://ow.ly/XYXK50xrsRX
In Silenced Voices, @lucyjpop turns her attention to the journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva, and the historian and activist Yuri Dmitriev, both of whom have been 'imprisoned on trumped-up charges' in Russia.
http://ow.ly/MWow50xqJOC
https://literaryreview.co.uk/svetlana-prokopyeva-yuri-dmitriev