Lucian Robinson
Dog Days
‘This place is full of thieves.’ This is how Momo, the teenage protagonist of Mohammed Hanif’s new novel, describes the refugee camp that he calls home. But it also signals that in the world of the novel’s setting – an unnamed desert somewhere along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border – everyone is complicit in a version of theft, whether material or emotional. The ‘international-aid types, nice-smelling do-gooders’, are, for Momo, ‘the biggest thieves of them all’, stealing the misery of others for their own use. In Hanif’s cynical satire, warfare necessarily rests on the dialectical relationship between destruction and reconstruction. ‘If I didn’t obliterate cities,’ a soldier asks, ‘how would you get to set up refugee camps?’
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'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2