Richard Cockett
Many Hills to Climb
Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads
By Benedict Rogers
Rider Books 272pp £12.99) order from our bookshop
The continuing transformation of Burma is one of the most surprising, encouraging and baffling political events of our time. Only two years ago the country was among the most isolated, oppressive and backward on the planet, and had been that way ever since the generals took over in a coup back in 1962. Now, it seems, the reformers in charge of the country, led by the new president, Thein Sein, can’t move fast enough to dismantle the apparatus of military dictatorship. And all this without a shot being fired, in stark contrast to the Arab uprisings.
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
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings