Michael Burleigh
Grease My Palm
Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security
By Sarah Chayes
W W Norton 262pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Thieves of State is instructive, though not in ways Sarah Chayes intended. Intellectuals are often attracted, like moths to the flame, to power, especially if that power consists of regimental insignia on the arms and phalanxes of aides called Bob or Chuck with laser wands to highlight PowerPoint presentations of kinetic kill rates.
In the following passage, Chayes describes a ‘gaggle’ at the Afghan headquarters of General David Petraeus, Commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF):
Petraeus dubbed us his ‘Directed Telescopes’. The group included the rotund and amicable [sic] Fred Kagan, of the American Enterprise Institute, a powerful framer of arguments, and his tiny, bespectacled, secrecy-obsessed wife Kim, who ran her own think tank called the Institute for the Study of War. There was intense
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
'Nourished on a diet of exceptionalism and meritocracy, millennials internalised the harmful falsehood that hard work necessarily yields success. The very least they should settle for is a "cool job", one that ... is the focus of their "passion".'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/workers-twerkers
'There is a difference between a doctor who writes medical treatises and a doctor who writes absurdist fiction. Do we want our heart surgeon to be an anti-realist?'
Joanna Kavenna peruses Iain Bamforth's 'Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trust-me-philosopher
How did Uwe Johnson, the German writer who was friends with Hannah Arendt and Max Frisch, end up living out his days in the town of Sheerness, Kent?
https://literaryreview.co.uk/estuary-german