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No Forbidden Zone in Reading?

For a decade, the monthly review Dushu has published some of China’s most incisive debates on the country’s culture and economy. Zhang Yongle’s survey relates the journal’s trajectory to the PRC’s dramatic development course and ruptures within its intelligentsia.

The Comrade from Milan

Memories of war-time resistance work and the political culture of the million-strong PCI in liberated Milan, from one of the founding editors of Il Manifesto. Questions and doubts, in this portrait of an unsentimental education.

Kali’s Prophet

Aaron Benanav on Thomas McCraw, Prophet of Innovation. A Schumpeter for post-Keynesian times? Professional trajectory and personal tragedies of the theorist of creative destruction.

Zion’s Rebel Daughter

Principally known for works on totalitarianism and the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt’s powerful and prophetic critiques of the Zionist project, written in the 1940s, have rarely been discussed. Gabriel Piterberg tracks the evolution of this brave and independent thinker.

From Arras to Thermidor

Christopher Prendergast on Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity. The life, career and death of Robespierre, permeated by tensions between ends and means, terror and virtue; and the polemical furies that have clouded his legacy.

A Hollow Crown

Duncan McCargo on Paul Handley, The King Never Smiles. Taboo-breaking biography of the world’s longest-serving monarch, Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej. Is the throne’s mystique, carefully reconsolidated in the 20th century, now threatened by the lottery of primogeniture?

Whitewashing Jackson

Tom Mertes on Sean Wilentz, Andrew Jackson. A retouched portrait of the Democrat founding father—minus Indian massacres, slave exploitation and financial bubble.

Being Max Weber

Peter Thomas on Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: die Leidenschaft des Denkens. The first full biography for 80 years, with new details of the thinker’s life seen through Green spectacles.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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