John Sweeney
Laughing all the Way to the Money-Launderers
McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers
By Misha Glenny
The Bodley Head 426pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
This is a big, noble book by a proper reporter who travels the world and gives the Mr Bigs of global crime a poke in the eye. His grand thesis is that we need effective world government to deal with the globalisation of money-laundering, drugs, arms-dealing and narco-trafficking. One is inclined to say: fat chance.
Misha Glenny was the BBC reporter in Yugoslavia in 1990 who prophesied gloom and was taken aside by the thought police and told to cheer up. Glenny was proved right as Tito’s old Yugoslavia splintered apart, and some of the best writing in the book concerns the Balkans mafia.
Glenny argues that that the opening up of world capital markets in the late Eighties and Nineties signalled the start of an enormous party for crooks and cheats the world over, and that the mass of ordinary, honest people will continue to suffer and lose out until global governance, demanding
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
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger
'The eight years he has spent in solitary confinement have had a devastating impact on his mental health ... human rights organisations believe his detention is punishment for his critical views.'
@lucyjpop on the Egyptian activist and poet Ahmed Douma.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/ahmed-douma