Jonathan Mirsky
Trials of the Artist
Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei
By Barnaby Martin
Faber & Faber 245pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Hanging Man is the most detailed, comprehensive and eloquent English-language account of what happens these days to Chinese political prisoners. It is horrifying and should make apologists for the People’s Republic of China, such as Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World, think again.
Born in 1957, the son of Ai Qing, one of Mao’s favourite poets until he was purged, Ai Weiwei may be the only Chinese artist of whom readers of the Literary Review have heard, if only because he is the creator, or organiser, of the hundred million handmade sunflower seeds
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Sarah Dunant on the life of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino.
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'McDormand has come closer to Lady Macbeth in some of her previous grimly comic performances ... Here she can convey only the banality of evil, as when she fussily curtails the banquet after Macbeth’s hallucination.'
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