Michael Burleigh
The Universal Scapegoat
Interventions: A Life in War and Peace
By Kofi Annan with Nader Mousavizadeh
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 383pp £25 order from our bookshop
The seventh permanent Secretary-General of the UN was born in Britain’s Gold Coast colony in 1938. His grandfathers on both sides were tribal chiefs. Annan’s father was a successful Unilever executive, conservative and gradualist who was sceptical of the radical haste of Kwame Nkrumah in achieving Ghanaian independence.
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.