http://lrb.co.uk/ Literary review publishing essay-length book reviews and topical articles on politics, literature, history, philosophy, science and the arts by leading writers and thinkers en-gb LRB (London) Ltd. Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT 20160 ben@lrb.co.uk (Ben Campbell) registrar@lrb.co.uk (Ben Campbell) http://lrb.co.uk/assets/images/lrb_160_w_on_b.gif http://lrb.co.uk/ London Review of Books logo http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n14/lanc01_.html diaries and memoirs New Labour's exes are a hard-publishing lot. So far we have had diaries from two of its central figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, and from a spin-doctor hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister's wife, his deputy and his bagman. The granddaddy of them all, Blair's own memoirs, are still to come. It is an unprecedented cascade of memoirs by prominent figures in a government which is, let's not forget, still in power. The phenomenon seemed odd when it began - Lance Price was called in front of a Parliamentary committee in December 2005 to account for his temerity in publishing his insider's account. By now we're used to it, and it's getting to the point where it would be more surprising for a New Labour insider not to publish a book explaining how he/she was both a. more at the centre of things than anybody had hitherto suspected while also b. not to blame for any of the stuff that went wrong. http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n14/wils07_.html travel In the fall of 2002, in the company of a dog named Charlie Chaplin and an architect named Michael Meredith, I set out to drive a 1960 Chevy Apache 10 pick-up truck, at 45 mph, from far west Texas to New York City: 2364 miles through desert, suburbs, forests, lake-spattered plains, mountains, farmland, more suburbs and the Holland Tunnel. I got to know both of my travelling companions during a brief period living in the town of Marfa, Texas, which is also where I found the truck, parked in front of the post office: boxy, banged up, covered in sky-blue house paint, the half-smashed windshield a lattice of stars and linear cracks, like a flag. A Mexican man in his sixties walked outside with his mail and drove it away. Then I found it parked out by the cemetery. Jesse Santesteban, the owner, showed me where he'd signed the engine compartment like an artist, and said I could take a closer look. The doors had handmade wooden armrests, and the seatbelts were fashioned of canvas and chain link. An orange shag carpet covered the floorboards. I offered him $1200 cash. He handed over a green plastic keychain that read 'Laugh, live, love and be happy!' and warned: 'Don't take it over 45 or it'll throw a rod.' A friend later explained: 'That's a polite way of saying the engine will explode.' http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n14/kunk01_.html fiction 'Netherland' is an ambiguous word. It evokes, of course, the Netherlands inhabited by the Dutch, one of whom, Hans van den Broek, tells this story of a few late years spent in that New World city founded almost four hundred years ago on Manhattan Island as New Amsterdam, in what was then the territory of New Netherland. But 'netherland' could also mean any faraway place, as in those 'nether regions' of the city where Hans's teammates from the Staten Island Cricket Club spend their nights. (Hans spends his nights in Chelsea, a Manhattan neighbourhood hardly described in this book, notable for a high concentration of well-built gay men, new condominiums, art galleries, bank branches and large home-furnishing outlets.) 'Netherland' also has sinister overtones of Never Never Land, and sounds like a euphemism for Hades. http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n14/hard01_.html current affairs 'Humanitarian intervention' has little to show for its brief appearance on the international stage. It arrived too late for Rwanda, gestured helplessly at Bosnia and, at last, in 2003, it was discovered in the arms of Shock and Awe, where it died of shame. Only Kosovo Albanians, about 1.8 million people, still applaud the violent expulsion of Slobodan Milosevic from their province in 1999. However they are less sure about the legacy of intervention and the advantages of being a United Nations protectorate. http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n14/ohag01_.html film http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n14/jone01_.html espionage http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/asch01_.html organised crime Karabas was gunned down in 1997. He and his mob had taken over the port city of Odessa as law and order disintegrated in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. One might call his reign a comprehensive protection racket. But, looked at in another way, Karabas became the only reliable source of authority and social discipline. He arbitrated the city's commercial disputes (10 per cent of net profits was his price); he kept the drug peddlers to one area of Odessa, and prevented the horrific people-smuggling in the harbour district from infecting the rest of the town. Using a bare minimum of thuggery, he kept the peace. Karabas seldom carried a gun. Everyone looked up to him, and levels of violence stayed lower in Odessa than in other Russian and Ukrainian cities. His murderers were probably Chechens hired to break Odessa's grip on the local oil industry, a grip coveted by Ukraine's then president, Leonid Kuchma, who 'during his ten years in power . . . presided over the total criminalisation of the Ukrainian government and civil service'. http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/mcki01_.html education and academia The modern history of English secondary education begins with the 1944 Education Act, usually known as the Butler Act. It was, for better and worse, the most important piece of education legislation of the 20th century, but was expected to reform an educational system already deeply divisive and inequitable. In some ways it promoted the hopes of wartime democracy; in others it betrayed them. It raised the school-leaving age to 15 and made secondary education universal and free. It equalised the payment of teachers in all state secondary schools and devised procedures by which nearly all the religious elementary schools were incorporated into the state system. It didn't specify what kind of secondary education local authorities should establish, and as a result they fell back on what already existed and what conventional opinion thought appropriate: grammar schools for the academically inclined, junior technical schools for those with superior technical aptitudes and secondary moderns for those of a 'practical' turn of mind. http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/burt01_.html fiction When an art form or genre once dismissed as kids' stuff starts to get taken seriously by gatekeepers - by journals, for example, such as the one you are reading now - respect doesn't come smoothly, or all at once. Often one artist gets lifted above the rest, his principal works exalted for qualities that other works of the same kind seem not to possess. Later on, the quondam genius looks, if no less talented, less solitary: first among equals, or maybe just first past the post. That is what happened to rock music in the late 1960s, when sophisticated critics decided, as Richard Poirier put it, to start 'learning from the Beatles'. It is what happened to comics, too, in the early 1990s, when the Pulitzer Prize committee invented an award for Art Spiegelman's Maus. And it has happened to science fiction, where the anointed author is Philip K. Dick. http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/disk01_.html travel The 'you can't understand until you've lived there' argument had kept me from visiting South Africa quite effectively. If being there would make me understanding of apartheid, I preferred to stay away. But now it had to be a very different place, 18 years after Nelson Mandela walked free from prison, 14 years on from the day when South Africa had its first democratic election. I was going to be there anyway - Cape Town was the end point of another journey - and I thought I'd spend a couple of weeks and look around; be a regular tourist in a place where minds had been changed. http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/wood01_.html film http://lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/soar01_.html politics http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n14/letters.html Correspondence The letters page from London Review of Books Volume 30 issue 14 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n14/contents.html Table of contents Table of contents from London Review of Books Volume 30 issue 14