Judith Vidal-Hall
Last of the Stalinists
Enver Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania
By Blendi Fevziu (Translated by Majlinda Nishku)
I B Tauris 300pp £25 order from our bookshop
Travel writers are tipping Albania as the next tourist hotspot, but what do we know of this ancient country? There is ‘luxury and inconvenience on the one hand, liberty, hard living, and filth on the other … Shut out … by iron walls of mountain, surrounded by the sternest features of savage scenery, rock and chasm, precipice and torrent, a more fearful prospect, and more chilling to the very blood, I never beheld.’
So Edward Lear described what at the time was an unknown and mysterious country in his Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania (1851). Edward Gibbon, half a century earlier, called it ‘a country within sight of Italy, which is less known than the interior of America’. These
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Joanna Kavenna reviews Maggie Nelson's ‘On Freedom’, ‘a very serious and beautiful book about why “freedom” has become such a vexed term, deployed so often in scenarios where it really means the opposite’.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/in-defence-of-ambivalence