Posts

The Sound of The Tide.

  On Derek Walcott Joseph Brodsky November 10, 1983 issue On Derek Walcott | Joseph Brodsky | The New York Review of Books Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them there comes a moment when the center ceases to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but language. Such was the case of Rome, and before that, of Hellenic Greece. The job of holding the center at such times is often done by the men from the provinces, from the outskirts. Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends—they are precisely where it begins to unfurl. That affects language no less than the eye. Derek Walcott was born on the island of Saint Lucia, in the parts where “the sun, tired of empire, declines.” As it does so, however, it heats up a far greater crucible of races and cultures than any other melting pot north of the equator. The realm this poet comes from is a genetic Babel; English, however, is its tongue. If at times Walcott w...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Soviet Network

  Richard Norton-Taylor The Soviet Network Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire By  Antonia Senior Hodder & Stoughton 496pp £25   It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as  Stalin’s Apostles  makes clear, such is not the case. Most of the books on what the KGB later called their ‘Magnificent Five’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – have dwelt on their early lives, how they were recruited by Soviet talent spotters and through their individual networks, and how they were allowed to spy, undetected, for so long. Antonia Senior’s message in this carefully researched and well-written book, rich in anecdotes and insights, is indicated by the subtitle. Senior, a former student of Christopher Andrew, the pioneering Cambridge historian of Britain’s secur...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Lesson of Vietnam

Image
  Give a gift Books A Lesson of Vietnam: Getting in Is Easier than Getting Out The war was sustained by a seductive delusion: that an unwinnable conflict might still be managed into an outcome short of humiliation. By  April 13, 2026 In the final collapse of South Vietnam, evacuation flights became scenes of panic, desperation, and abandonment. Photograph from Rolls Press / Popperfoto / Getty Save this story O n March 8, 1965, at 9   a.m ., United States marines landed on a beach ten miles north of the city of Da Nang, South Vietnam. Americans had been providing direct military support in South Vietnam since 1954, the year the country was split in two, and the war, beginning with France’s fight to preserve its colony, had been going on since 1946. But the marines were the first American combat troops to arrive. The Johnson Administration downplayed the significance of the landing. It explained that the marines were being deployed to secure an airbase used for Operati...
Post a Comment
Read more