‘The only European society that has tried to learn from its vicious past is clearly struggling to remember its main lesson.’
Pankaj Mishra on Germany’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian expression:
‘The level of urban starvation in Gaza has not been seen since the Dutch Hunger Winter and the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War.’
Alex de Waal on Gaza, Israel and the vexed definitions of famine:
The front cover of the latest issue of the London Review of Books is strong. I can't download it, but it should be circulated. Yet again the New York Review of Books has fallen way behind, no equivalent of Shatz or Mishra. With NYT floundering its a pity the NYRB is so cautious
Pankaj Mishra’s new essay ‘The Big Con’ has had an huge impact in India — in fact it’s the second most-read piece on our website so far this year.
350 million Indians went to sleep hungry in 2022, he writes, a number that’s almost doubled in just 4 years:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/…
‘Eric Hobsbawm: The Consolations of History’, a new documentary by @Antwilks, is now online.
The film traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, with help from the observations of MI5.
Watch it here now!
‘The loss of more than 90 per cent of Southern California’s agricultural buffer zone is the principal if seldom mentioned reason wildfires increasingly incinerate such spectacular swathes of luxury real estate.’
Mike Davis, from 2007:
Assange and WikiLeaks did what all journalists should do, which is to make important information available to the public, enabling people to make evidence-based judgments about the actions of their governments.
Patrick Cockburn:
‘When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted.’
Hilary Mantel wrote many wonderful pieces for the LRB and we’d hoped she’d write many more: lrb.co.uk/contributors/h…
‘In the mid-1960s Vernon Jordan, the head of the Urban League, asked Nina Simone how come she wasn’t “more active in civil rights”. “Motherfucker, I am civil rights,” she replied.’
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From 2016, John Lahr on Nina Simone, born #onthisday:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/…