Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Ed Pilkington in The Guardian: Jeffrey Epstein: how US media – with one star exception – whitewashed the story The “one star exception” here is the Miami Herald, which published a series of investigative pieces by Julie K. Brown. But…
The Argumentative Old Git writes about two opera performances he’s been to recently. One of them was a semi-staged performance of The Cunning Little Vixen by Leoš Janáček at the Barbican, with Simon Rattle conducting the LSO and Lucy Crowe…
Osip Mandelstam wrote a poem in 1933 that begins approximately like this: Do not tempt alien tongues – rather try to forget them:No matter what, you won’t be able to bite glass with your teeth. It’s not an invective against…
The great Morrissey’s at it again: …She [For Britain leader Anne Marie Waters] is extremely intelligent, ferociously dedicated to this country, she is very engaging, and also very funny at times… Everyone ultimately prefers their own race – does this…
Mateusz Mazzini argues in Foreign Policy: The revisionist politics of the current Polish government plays right into Moscow’s hands. A rejection of multilateralism, strife with the EU, and growing antagonism with neighbors, notably Germany and Ukraine—all these features of Polish…
Alice Cherki, a friend and colleague of Frantz Fanon, writes in her memoir: Fanon went to Moscow in mid-January 1961. He had put on some weight, and his white cell count was substantially lower… [Dr. Michel] Martini remembers that Fanon…
James Butler on the LRB blog (June 12), comparing Boris Johnson and Donald Trump: …whereas Trump has a genuine reserve of rage and fixation with particular policies, Johnson’s desire for power is unimpeded by such attachments. I take this for…
It has been reported that hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million people have taken to the streets in Hong Kong to protest against a law that would make the city’s residents extraditable to China. A huge turnout for a city…
The Guardian has a write-up on Russian political prisoners. Not all of them: the human rights group Memorial puts their total number at 77 while another recent estimate is 230, and the total number of people persecuted for political reasons…
Thomas Meaney – a contributor to the London Review of Books among other things – writes about Frantz Fanon’s last journey and the CIA’s sympathies for independence movements in Africa and the Third World, more generally. In 1961, Fanon was…
David Papineau, Professor of philosophy of science at King’s College London, writes in Aeon: Imagine that 100 prisoners are exercising in the prison yard, and suddenly 99 of them attack the guard, carrying out a plan that the 100th prisoner…
Forty years ago, Leon Edel – an expert on Henry James – sneered at Nabokov’s claim that the communist revolution in Russia completely destroyed the rule of law and took away all the limited but tangible liberties that Russians enjoyed…