Christopher Andrew
The Big Chill
The most difficult question posed by the Cold War is why it did not end in hot war. Odd Arne Westad, a professor of history at Harvard, argues persuasively that it very nearly did: ‘On a couple of occasions, we were much closer to nuclear devastation than anyone but a few people realized. Nuclear war could have broken out by accident, or as a result of intelligence failures.’ In 1962 Fidel Castro seems to have believed that the Cuban Missile Crisis would end in thermonuclear warfare. In what he probably intended as a farewell letter to Nikita Khrushchev, he urged him to take the ‘harsh and terrible’ decision to launch a nuclear first strike against the United States if it invaded Cuba.
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Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3