Tag: Books and literature

Literary Celebrity, Mussolini’s Mouthpiece, and American Traitor: Who Was Ezra Pound?

Stephen Harding on the Modernist Poet and His Fascist Politics By the spring of 1939, the widely acknowledged dean of Anglo-American Modernist poetry, fifty-three-year-old Ezra Pound, had lived in Europe for three decades. After leaving the United States in 1908 at the age of twenty- three, the poet had initially settled in London, then moved… Read More Literary Celebrity, Mussolini’s Mouthpiece, and American Traitor: Who Was Ezra Pound?

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An Aesthete at War

Ernst Junger (1895-1998): Jünger found his countrymen’s discriminatory treatment of French Jews unacceptable. In his Parisian diaries, the writer wrote on 7 June 1942 that he had encountered for the first time the yellow star carried by three little girls who were passing by in the Rue Royale, and that he considered that day as fundamental in his personal history,… Read More An Aesthete at War

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Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: From a book on authoritarianism, lessons on ‘realism’ for India

The Captive Mind, Czesław Miłosz’s searing anatomy of authoritarianism, highlights the dangers of self-deception in the name of ‘realism’ The Captive Mind, Czesław Miłosz’s searing anatomy of authoritarianism, tells a story drawn from an older Polish novel by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Insatiability. Europe is about to be overrun by a Sino-Mongolian army that dominates from… Read More Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: From a book on authoritarianism, lessons on ‘realism’ for India

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A Famous Enigma: On Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography and “The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève”

Isabel Jacobs “Be human, after all!” – “But I don’t want to be human!” Bertolt Brecht, Mahagonny, cited by Kojève Until 2025, the name “Alexandre Kojève” was a paradox. A philosopher often invoked yet rarely read – a famous enigma. For decades, Kojève’s mythical reputation rested on rumors and anecdotes orbiting his Hegel seminar of the 1930s.… Read More A Famous Enigma: On Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography and “The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève”

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Lord of the Flies

The BBC just released a new adaptation of Lord of the Flies, the classic novel by William Golding. It’s beautifully made, but it’s still telling the wrong story… Stories are never just stories. We become the stories that we tell ourselves.” A few years ago, I went looking for the *real* Lord of the Flies.… Read More Lord of the Flies

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‘A white man’s war, a Black man’s fight’: the eye-opening story of Black soldiers in Vietnam

At a time when Black military history is being rewritten under Trump officials, new book The War Within a War provides a vital reminder Martin Pengelly Wil Haygood’s new book, his 10th, is The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home. Meeting in Washington DC to discuss it, he produces from… Read More ‘A white man’s war, a Black man’s fight’: the eye-opening story of Black soldiers in Vietnam

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Naravane Exposé Reveals Delhi Runs on Narrative

Without alignment between military capability, strategic doctrine and civilian decision-making, India’s deterrence posture will remain asymmetric and operationally hollow. What remains really indispensable is political honesty. The suppression of Naravane’s memoir itself has become emblematic of this failure. A government unwilling to level with parliament or the public about how close India came to escalation… Read More Naravane Exposé Reveals Delhi Runs on Narrative

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