Brendan Simms
Lives Go On
The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia – The Reckoning
By Ed Vulliamy
The Bodley Head 256pp £20
Most great British institutions had a ‘bad’ Bosnian war. John Major’s Conservative government resolutely refused to intervene to prevent ethnic cleansing, and stopped the Americans from doing so for as long as it could. The Foreign Office consistently argued for a ‘moral equivalence’ between aggressor and victim. The army, remarkable individual performances notwithstanding, showed a noticeable partiality towards the Bosnian Serb aggressors. The ‘experts’, both civilian and military, vastly overreckoned the fighting power of the Bosnian Serbs, and hugely underestimated both the effectiveness of air power and the advantages of exempting the Bosnian government from the international arms embargo (‘lift and strike’, as its American advocates called it). Parliament, both the upper and lower houses, generally echoed these arguments.
Amid this tale of failure, the Fourth Estate – British journalists – stood out. Men and women from print and broadcast media such as Maggie O’Kane, Alec Russell, Janine di Giovanni, Martin Bell and many others ‘told it as it was’: they exposed the horrors of ethnic cleansing and provided
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
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk