In the depths of winter I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer – Albert Camus; The Stranger Heroism isn’t much… happiness is more difficult – Letters to a German friend Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling… Read More Invincible Summer – Albert Camus
There is an adjective that all too invitingly describes the wildly optimistic endeavours of the American book collector, the Hungarian-British explorer and the two Kashmiri pandits who, almost a century ago, took it upon themselves to translate Don Quixote into Sanskrit for the first time. Today, the same word might equally be applied to the… Read More Sanskrit translation of Don Quixote rescued from oblivion
Last Man Standing – Fukuyama pines for that old-time liberalism “IN WATCHING THE FLOW of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something fundamental has happened in world history.” These were the seminal opening words of Francis Fukuyama’s article “The End of History?” published in the… Read More So history didn't end after all
ROLAND BARTHES IN CHINA (Simon Leys; re-published in his book of essays: The Hall of Uselessness, 2014) Sed perseverare… (To err is human, (but) to persist is diabolical) IN APRIL and May of 1974, Roland Barthes made a trip to China with a small group of his friends from the review Tel Quel. This visit coincided… Read More Roland Barthes in China; or how to plumb the depths of professorial vacuity…
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper hold that while “empires” are often seen now as haunting specters of tyranny and oppression, it has not always been so. Instead, they posit that empires have taken many different shapes and have been the most influential form of political rule over the last two millennia. The authors seek not… Read More Book review: Empires in World History
The horrifying photograph of children fleeing a deadly napalm attack has become a defining image not only of the Vietnam War but the 20th century. Dark smoke billowing behind them, the young subjects’ faces are painted with a mixture of terror, pain and confusion. Soldiers from the South Vietnamese army’s 25th Division follow helplessly behind. Taken… Read More 'Napalm Girl' at 50: The story of the Vietnam War's defining photo / “Because Our Fathers Lied”: Craig McNamara Reveals the Lies of His Father, Robert McNamara
NB: An excellent review of an excellent book. Purushottam Agrawal has done us a public service. DS Kabir, the famous religious poet of Varanasi, lived from roughly 1440 CE to 1518 CE. He first became well-known outside of India in 1915 when Rabindranath Tagore published an English translation of 100 songs, or bhajans, attributed to Kabir. Tagore’s translation… Read More Book review: Kabir and the Question of Modernity
When the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature, had trouble getting the third part of The Quiet Don approved for publication, he appealed to Maxim Gorky, then the supreme authority in Soviet literary affairs. Gorky invited him to his mansion, which had been a gift from Stalin to lure Gorky… Read More Book review – Stalin: his own avatar
Over the past two centuries, most critiques of modernity have fallen into one of two camps. The first tends to see the modern age as the spawn of the tragic dissolution of Christian civilization, which had provided stable meaning and order for over a millennium, while the second emphasizes the failures of modernity to fulfill… Read More Book review: The Corruption of the Best – On Ivan Illich
Farrukh Dhondy, who was Charles Sobhraj’s arm’s-length friend for much of his corpse-strewn career, leaves what the reader really wants to know for the epilogue: “How did he manage to seduce so many women ― is he really charismatic and charming?” Dhondy reports that he is “an average bloke”, but “there was something in his… Read More Book review: Charles Sobhraj, the Average and Slippery Bloke With Notions of Being a Super-Criminal
