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The Life and Times of Simón B

Tariq Ali on John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: a Life. The Liberator as pragmatist, and his legacy from the colonial Andes to the Caracas of today—a prophylactic portrait for the times?

Necessary Love

Liberation from bourgeois marriage, central radical demand from Sand and Kollontai to Piercy, is subsumed in the age of global capital by calls for same-sex property rights. Wollen’s unmade film treatment celebrates loves unsanctified by church or state—de Beauvoir’s relationships with Sartre and Algren.

An Arabian Master

The remarkable life and literary career of Abd al-Rahman Munif, author of the Cities of Salt quintet. Sabry Hafez charts the emergence of Munif’s searing fictions. Evocations of desert traditions, foreign interference, the deformities of despotism and lessons of resistance.

Napoleon the Double

Tami Sarfatti on Steven Englund, Napoleon: a Political Life. Ambiguities of the citizen-emperor, and the twists of his career in France.

The Prisoner

Tsering Shakya on Melvyn Goldstein et al, A Tibetan Revolutionary. Memoirs of an indigenous Lenin from the Land of Snows, and his long imprisonment by the Mao government.

The Third Crusade

Richard Gott on Anthony Seldon, Blair. As ‘Iraq’ joins ‘Munich’ and ‘Suez’ in the lexicon of British foreign-policy disasters, does the Labour Prime Minister have his own neo-imperial programme?

The Lovelorn Librarian

Efraín Kristal on Edwin Williamson, Borges. A Life. The personal chagrins and political conversions of Argentina’s greatest writer, from youthful lyrics on the Red Guard to elderly pleasantries with Pinochet, and final recusances.

Over-Man and the Commune

Peter Thomas on Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico and Jan Rehmann, Postmoderner Links-Nietzscheanismus. Two deconstructions of contemporary treatments of Nietzsche, restoring the virulence of his thought to its nineteenth-century contexts.

Jupiter Hill

Political education in the dungeons of Barcelona, and the converging tracks of Filipino and Cuban revolutionaries as the 400-year-old Spanish empire enters its final throes. Benedict Anderson concludes his exploration of the late 19th-century world setting of José Rizal’s explosive anti-colonial novels.

Delors Agonistes

Alan Milward on Jacques Delors, Mémoires. How the birth of a social Europe was thwarted by French Socialists and English Thatcherites alike, as the riptide of marketization headed east.

Surrealism’s Nameless Soldier

Michael Löwy on Claude Cahun, Écrits. Breton’s stylish collaborator on the left wing of the Surrealist movement, and her guerrilla art in the Nazi-occupied Channel Islands.

In the World-Shadow of Bismarck and Nobel

After the literary revelations of ‘Nitroglycerine in the Pomegranate’ (NLR 27), a new political reading of José Rizal’s astonishing last novel. Imperial power, anarchist bombings and anti-colonial insurrection in the gifted young Filipino’s vision of a 19th-century global landscape.

A Citizen of Kakania

Stefan Jonsson on Karl Corino, Robert Musil: Eine Biographie. Correspondences between The Man Without Qualities and the turbulent life and times of its creator, in a definitive new German biography.

Nitroglycerine in the Pomegranate

Literary interactions between world capital and colonial periphery in the late nineteenth century—how rebel Filipino novelist José Rizal transformed elements of decadent aestheticism in Huysmans’s À Rebours, to explosive political effect.

Lessons from the Golden Age

Efraín Kristal on Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale. Crossing the arts of autobiography, politics and fiction in the Caribbean littoral.

Remembering Edward Said

The physical and moral courage of a unique writer, and fighter—leading Arab intellectual, unconforming cultural theorist, champion of the Palestinian cause in the heartland of Israeli overseas power.

Bisexual Byron

Benjamin Markovits on Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend. Sexual and political impulses in the making of Childe Harold, in person and imagination.

A Socialist Cassandra

Susan Watkins on Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left. The distinctive intelligence of a continental socialist in Britain.

The Poet of Decembrism?

Tony Wood on T. J. Binyon, Pushkin: A Biography. Scouring the crust of patriotic myths from the image of Russia’s greatest poet.

Overcoming Emancipation

Gopal Balakrishnan on Martin Beck Matuštík, Jürgen Habermas: a Philosophical-Political Profile. Bends in the thought of Germany’s leading philosopher, and its engagement with history, across half a century.

Prophet-Pariah

David Fernbach on Robert Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and his Circle. Towering poet-prophet of German purity, wished away by Nazis, anti-fascists and the gay community alike.

Woe to the Victor

Tony Wood on Laurence Kelly, Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran. The strange career of Alexander Griboyedov, Russia’s satirist playwright and predator envoy to Persia.

The Oracle of Post-Democracy

Gopal Balakrishnan on Sheldon Wolin: Tocqueville Between Two Worlds. The first theorist of modern democracy in the twilight of what has become of it in his land of reference.

A Guest from the Past

Tony Wood on The Diaries of Nikolai Punin and N. N. Punin, Dnevniki. Pis’ma. The life and times of Russia’s leading theorist of the visual avant-garde, in times of war and revolution.

In Bluebeard’s Chamber: Guilt and Thomas Mann

What deadly secrets (boys apart) did Thomas Mann have to hide? The Auguste Dupin of German letters follows a trail of bloody knives, howling dogs and unbidden confessions from Buddenbrooks and ‘Tonio Kröger’ to Doktor Faustus and Felix Krull.

Japan’s Houdini

Gavan McCormack on Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. A pathbreaking study of the life and times of the Showa Emperor, and of his American protectors.

A Spanish Singleton

Peter Gowan on Jeffrey Johnson, ed., Selected Works of Juan Donoso Cortés. The prophetic insights of Spain’s saturnine master of anti-socialist statecraft, halfway through the nineteenth century.

The Education of Edward Said

Michael Gilsenan on Edward Said, Out of Place. At the unsettled origins of Orientalism—memoirs of gilded dispossession in a colonial Middle East.

Deadly Potions: Kleist and Wagner

Could there have been a link between Kleist’s suicide and Wagner’s Liebestod? Michael Maar’s bravura exploration of the ties of life and art that bound the composer to the writer—sexual and lethal passions in the same retort.

The Secret Life of Ignazio Silone

John Foot on Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali, L’informatore. The sensational revelation of Ignazio Silone’s long-term service as informer for Mussolini’s regime—the Italian Orwell as a fascist spy.

A Tale of Two Cities

Adventures in pursuit of house and home across three continents—from service with national liberation in Mozambique to the labyrinths of bureaucratic Moscow and the tribulations of DIY Chicago. An Armenian’s sly homage to upside-down internationalism.

False Indignation

Russell Jacoby on Guy Oakes and Arthur Vidich, Collaboration, Reputation and Ethics in American Academic Life. The relationship between Gerth and Mills in the retrospect of orthodox sociology.

Two on the Marble Cliffs

Gopal Balakrishnan on Ernst Jünger–Carl Schmitt, Briefwechsel. Correspondence between two of Germany's most important thinkers of the radical Right.

Counsellor to Clinton

Tom Mertes on Dick Morris, The New Prince. America's fallen political adviser as a surrogate Machiavelli for the White House.

The Nine Lives of Karl Marx

Susan Watkins on Francis Wheen, Karl Marx. The latest biography—a man for postmodern times?

Rosa Luxemburg’s Political Heir: An Appreciation of Paul Levi

“Seventy years after his death in 1930, a full biography of Paul Levi is still awaited. In English, the material available on him is scant indeed. Yet the most basic facts of his life, cut short in middle years, suggest an individual whose contribution to the socialist cause . . .” read more

A Gift of Memory

“I arrived in London on 28 July and gave to Verso the next day a floppy disk containing some three hundred pages of a new manuscript, assuming that a copy of them would be sent to Michael in due time. Then I travelled further, into North America, and . . .” read more

Michael Sprinker, 1950-1999

“John Michael Sprinker—a member of the editorial board of this journal, co-editor of the Haymarket series for Verso, a fiercely dedicated teacher and ferociously intelligent literary and cultural critic—died suddenly, of a massive coronary, on 12 August 1999, in Port Jefferson, New York. He was 49 years old. . . .” read more

Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence

“On 12 January 1969, Herbert Marcuse wrote to Theodor Adorno announcing a June visit to Frankfurt. He wanted to give a lecture. He requested that the meeting be small and intimate, and solicited an official invitation, so that he could get leave from the University of California. This . . .” read more

Correspondence on the German Student Movement

“Prof. Dr. Theodor W. Adorno” read more

Fosterites and Feminists, Or 1950s Ultra-Leftists and the Invention of AmeriKKKa

“‘It suffices but to mention the chauvinist ideology which still penetrates the core and culture of our national life, rendering many people susceptible to infliction from this social disease.’—Claudia Jones” read more

The Multiple Identities of Walter Benjamin

“In the August issue of Biography, a popular us magazine, the editor-in-chief prefaces some musing on that month’s star profiles, General George C. Marshall and Tina Turner, with an outline of the magazine’s core philosophy: ‘No two life stories are even remotely the same, even the ones . . .” read more

Fela Anikulapo Kuti: A Honest Man

“Through an accident—performing a service for a friend of his in London—I was invited to stay in Fela’s house the first time I visited Africa. In 1973 the naira was high, Lagos hotels were expensive as well as bad, and I was not rich, so I accepted. For . . .” read more

CLR James and the Trinidad & Tobago Intellectual Tradition, Or, Not Learning Shakespeare Under a Mango Tree

“Trinidad and Tobago has produced many outstanding scholars, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century: Sylvester Williams, usually described as the father of Pan Africanism; George Padmore, author of Pan Africanism or Communism?, among other titles, and another prominent member of the activists in Pan Africanism; . . .” read more

A Minority of One: An Interview with Norman Mailer

“I think of you as someone who’s always been in the opposition, always a dissident, not just to the wider society but even in his own circles. I remember you once saying to me that you’d refined your dissidence, you could give it a name, you were now . . .” read more

Raphael Samuel: 1934-1996

“Raphael Samuel, who died of cancer in December—in the old weaver’s house in Elder Street he loved so much, behind Spitalfield Market in the heart of what was once Jewish and Radical London—was one of the most outstanding, original intellectuals of his generation: a lifelong socialist of deep . . .” read more

Raphael Samuel: The Politics of Thick Description

“Raphael Samuel was a founder of this Review, a constant friend and counsellor to its editors and an outstanding contributor. The articles he wrote for us proved to be landmark texts, amongst the dozen or so most important that we have published. The process of extracting them was . . .” read more

Some Memories of Raphael

“My first memory of Raphael is at a history meeting in St Hilda’s, Oxford in the early 60s. I think it may have been the Stubbs Society, anyway it was august and formal and donnish and he was a dark, thin, extraordinary figure with a flop of hair . . .” read more

Love’s Work

“‘As a form of counter-desolation,’ Ricoeur tells us, ‘consolation can be a lucid manner—just as lucid as Aristotelian katharsis—of mourning for oneself. Here, too, a fruitful exchange can be established between literature and being-toward-death.’” read more

Anarchy in Academia

“In a period when Anglophone philosophy has been represented as isolated from the European mainland, philosophy in England, America, and Australia in the twentieth century has in fact been remarkably invigorated and decisively shaped by Continental émigrés, beginning with Wittgenstein and including Carnap and Popper. Most of these . . .” read more