The main argument of Dan Wang’s Breakneck, which contrasts modern China with the United States, is that ‘China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, facing off against America’s lawyerly society, which blocks everything it can.’ According to Wang, this tension between get-it-done technocracy on the one hand and rule-bound caution on […]
China’s four great inventions are known as papermaking, printing, gunpowder and the compass. That list leaves out China’s most influential invention: the examination system. The system can be living hell for exam takers, but it is arguably the least bad mechanism for selecting talent, which helps to explain why it has spread to the rest […]
Born of Jewish-Russian parents who emigrated to the United States when she was seven, Julia Ioffe has long been one of the sharpest commentators on her former homeland. This is her first book. Writing it, she says, she had two aims: to find out why the Soviet Union reneged on its early promises of gender […]
In Mexico City on 27 September 1842, a man was delivering an unusual eulogy. Fixing his eyes on what he called ‘the mutilated remains of an illustrious leader of independence’, the speaker was so moved that he felt he must ‘shed ardent tears over the remains of the hero’ before him. The occasion, however, was not quite as sad as he made out. For the hero, Antonio López de Santa Anna, a general and many times president of Mexico, was listening to the speech. What was being buried, for the
‘Is this it?’ Governor Spencer Cox asked in the aftermath of the recent fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah. ‘Is this what 250 years has wrought upon us?’ His timeline referred to the nation’s forthcoming semiquincentennial next year: the celebration of 250 years of the United States – as of from the […]
Andrew Hussey, formerly dean of the University of London Institute in Paris, has had a long and distinguished career in France. In his 2014 book, The French Intifada, he predicted that France was on the verge of war with its growing North African immigrant population. Today he admits that this prediction was premature. Instead, the […]
Why is New York City so endlessly compelling? Its residents – an army of the brash, unpretentious and hilariously unapologetic – certainly know how to make a drama out of a crisis. Many New Yorkers seem to think the world revolves around them (to be fair, sometimes this is true). In the 1980s, New York […]
Longstanding readers of Literary Review .might recall the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul. In 2003, after an argument with its manager, my late friend and co-author of a guide to Afghanistan, Matthew Leeming, described it in these pages as ‘the worst hotel in the world’. ‘Two guests have recently drowned in the swimming pool,’ he complained. […]
On Easter Sunday 1722, sailors participating in a Dutch West India Company-sponsored expedition led by the explorer Jacob Roggeveen became the first Europeans to set eyes on the place now known by the Polynesian name Rapa Nui. Thousands of kilometres from the South American landmass and the nearest inhabited Pacific islands, Rapa Nui – also […]
John Foot’s history of the Red Brigades is as comprehensive a study as you will find, and it should be the final one. Yet it won’t be. The Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse in Italian) will continue, perhaps forever, to haunt the Italian psyche. Italy today still debates the ruthless violence perpetrated by the Marxist-Leninist organisation […]
While most people associate the term ‘partition’ with the division of India and Pakistan in 1947, Sam Dalrymple argues that the dismantling of the British Raj involved four other partitions. Each of these had massive but relatively unconsidered consequences, including bloodshed, famine and the creation of twelve nation-states. The end of the Raj led to […]
For around two decades from the early 1990s, more than eighty thousand Chinese baby girls were adopted by American families. Those families were told that the children were victims of the ‘boy preference’ in Chinese society and the notorious one-child policy, which for over thirty years restricted parents to a single baby in most circumstances. […]
In 1832, Charles Darwin, then a little-known 23-year-old graduate, arrived in South America aboard HMS Beagle on the first leg of his voyage around the world. His impressions were mixed. While he delighted in the metropolitan charms of Buenos Aires and Montevideo and was enchanted by Patagonia’s gauchos – rugged frontier figures in flowing ponchos […]
Lahore lies just thirty miles from Amritsar on the Grand Trunk Road, but few will ever make the journey. For centuries, it was a staging post for merchants travelling from Samarkand to Bengal, built by successive empires around an ancient citadel tucked inside a tributary of the Indus. The gates of its walled city face […]
Visiting Pompeii comes with a health risk, Gabriel Zuchtriegel tells us. In his first weeks as director general of Pompeii’s archaeological park, an employee quietly informed him that heart attacks are a common occurrence along the city’s basalt streets. Zuchtriegel optimistically wonders whether these constitute cases of Stendhal syndrome. After all, a place like the […]
In June 2022, the British journalist Dom Phillips was in the Javari valley, a vast indigenous territory in the far west of the Brazilian Amazon, near the border with Colombia and Peru. He was travelling down the Itaquaí River with his mentor and friend the indigenista Bruno Pereira when a group of men fishing illegally […]
On 27 May 1879, the steamer Chinsura arrived at the port of Stone Town in Zanzibar with the Irish adventurer Frederick Carter and four Indian elephants on board. Starting at Mumbai in India, they had completed the first leg of one of the most ambitious colonial ventures of the 19th century: to establish a training […]
Candour in an explorer is to be applauded. ‘For me,’ writes Erling Kagge, ‘cannibalism is a kind of necessary evil … I would certainly eat a friend who was already dead if the alternative was to starve to death. It would of course be terrible … but I think my companions would understand.’ Kagge, the […]
Are the Baltic Sea states, as former Estonian president Lennart Meri once put it, the factory of Europe’s future? Oliver Moody’s brilliantly written, convincingly argued and compelling book makes a good argument that it is in the plucky, resilient and often overlooked littoral states of the Baltic that the spirit of Europe burns strongest.
According to Moody, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine the Baltic countries – encompassing here not just Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, but also Finland, Poland and Sweden – have ‘articulated and realised
Crimea has been much in the news in the last few years, yet there is still a tendency to think of it as an appendage at the eastern extremity of Europe. Barely connected to the mainland, Crimea is comparable to Sicily. It is situated halfway across the Black Sea and has close connections to the […]
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The latest volume of T S Eliot’s letters, covering 1942–44, reveals a constant stream of correspondence. By contrast, his poetic output was negligible.
Robert Crawford ponders if Eliot the poet was beginning to be left behind.
Robert Crawford - Advice to Poets
Robert Crawford: Advice to Poets - The Letters of T S Eliot, Volume 10: 1942–1944 by Valerie Eliot & John Haffenden (edd)
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What a treat to see CLODIA @Lit_Review this holiday!
"[Boin] has succeeded in embedding Clodia in a much less hostile environment than the one in which she found herself in Ciceronian Rome. She emerges as intelligent, lively, decisive and strong-willed.”
Daisy Dunn - O, Lesbia!
Daisy Dunn: O, Lesbia! - Clodia of Rome: Champion of the Republic by Douglas Boin
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‘A fascinating mixture of travelogue, micro-history and personal reflection.’
Read the review of @Civil_War_Spain’s Travels Through the Spanish Civil War in @Lit_Review👇
John Foot - Grave Matters
John Foot: Grave Matters - Travels Through the Spanish Civil War by Nick Lloyd; El Generalísimo: Franco – Power...
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