Donald Rayfield
The Troubled Bear
International law firms are cleaning up the books of Russian conglomerates so that they conglomerates on the world's stock markets; President Putin supplies Europe with gas, oil and the freedom to expand Nato and the European Union right to his borders; rich Russians keep afloat our minor public schools with their offspring and help to sustain property prices in Sevenoaks, not to mention a football team in Chelsea and casinos in Mayfair. Russian is now one of the commonest languages to be heard on Oxford Street. So you think that the bad old days are all over, and that we should now put two hundred years of paranoia about the big black bear behind us?
Read this collection of seven articles by Anna Politkovskaya (in Arch Tait's lively translation) and be fooled no longer. Politkovskaya is Russia's bravest surviving journalist: I can't imagine anyone selling her life insurance, however. Shortly after
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
'Things began to go wrong between Mr and Mrs Eliot almost immediately. Ostensibly the problem was Vivien’s mysteriously fluctuating health. It would be easy to reduce the Eliot marriage simply to a catalogue of Viv’s medical crises.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/marriage-made-in-hell
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions