The New York Review of Books

How Great Was Churchill?

Brian Urquhart

Code word “Cromwell”—the warning that German invasion was imminent—was communicated to British army units on September 5, 1940. The 130th Infantry Brigade of the 43rd (Wessex) Division, in which I was serving, was rushed to the southeast coast to take up positions in and around Dover, the British port nearest to occupied France. Our division was said, after the losses at Dunkirk, to be the only fully equipped ...

Meritocrats

Tony Judt

I came up to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1966. Ours was a—perhaps the—transitional generation. We were past the midpoint of the 1960s—the Mods had come and gone and the Beatles were about to record Sgt. Pepper—but the King’s into which I was matriculated was still strikingly traditional. Dinner in Hall was formal, begowned—and required. Undergraduates took their seats, awaited the arrival of the Fellows, then rose to watch a long line of elderly gentlemen shuffle past them on their way to High Table.

‘A Rapturous Spooky Dream’

Julian Bell

“The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.”[^1] The line dates from 1917: it concluded Marcel Duchamp’s riposte to the New York exhibition committee that had turned down Fountain, his submission of a signed urinal. The objection that his alter ego “Mr. Mutt” had plagiarized the work of sanitary engineers was “absurd,” Duchamp protested in a little review he edited. Introducing his ...

On Handguns and the Law

Stephen Breyer

The following is drawn from Justice Breyer’s forthcoming book Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge’s View, to be published by Knopf in September. In that book Justice Breyer uses examples drawn from the Court’s history to show how its members have approached decisions in difficult cases. In this excerpt concerning a 2008 case, District of Columbia v. Heller, Justice Breyer seeks, as he has written, “to explain ...

The Marrying Kind

Diane Johnson

Books of advice about finding love and keeping it have been around, offering formulas and nostrums to readers and believers, since the beginning of print, and so have statistics about the demise of marriage. But Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert and Marry Him by Lori Gottlieb suggest that what is new is the mindset of the intended readers. What do we take from the new sensibilities of today’s authors and readers, the thirty-somethings weighing these age-old issues? Has anything really changed?

Vermeer

Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.

Strangely Sinister in Saratoga

Christopher Benfey

Geoffrey O’Brien’s delicious and deceptively intricate The Fall of the House of Walworth, a true-crime “tale of madness and murder,” offers a new twist on the Gothic strain in American life and literature. Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote “The Fall of the House of Usher,” might have admired it. On June 3, 1873, Mansfield Tracy Walworth of Saratoga Springs, author of the sensationalist novels Warwick and Delaplaine—books ...

Brotherhood

Sue Halpern

Even before it won last year’s Oscar for Best Picture, the Iraq war movie The Hurt Locker, which was nothing if not a celebration of battlefield bravery, was taken to task by veterans for its inaccuracies, hyperbole, and all-around Hollywoodization of what went on during that conflict. Without an allegiance to the facts, the experience of soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan would, in the words of Paul Rieckhoff ...

Bitter Truths

Sanford Schwartz

In 2006, the Metropolitan Museum opened one of the most engrossing shows of twentieth-century art it has ever done. This was “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s,” a beautifully selected look at the work of Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Otto Dix, and a number of lesser-known figures—including Karl Hubbuch, Ludwig Meidner, and Christian Schad—during the notoriously fraught era bounded, on one end, by the conclusion of ...

The Short Happy Life of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov

Elaine Blair

Ivan Goncharov worked on Oblomov for about ten years, from the late 1840s until 1858, but a reader is left with the impression that the hero was born to him in a single vision, and that the five-hundred-plus pages of the book are an attempt at novelistic elaboration of what is essentially one idea: What if a man were so indolent that he could do nothing? Aristocrats in Russian literature ...

The Prime of Muriel Spark

David Lodge

Muriel Spark published twenty-two novels in her lifetime, in spite of beginning relatively late at the age of thirty-nine, and at least half of them are classics by the only criterion that really matters—they invite and reward repeated reading. She was the most original and innovative British novelist writing in the second half of the twentieth century, extending the possibilities of fiction for other writers as well as herself ...

The Health Bill Explained at Last

Theodore R. Marmor and Jonathan Oberlander

In a June 21 survey of the public’s response to the health care reform bill passed by Congress in March of this year, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that while 48 percent of those polled were favorable to the bill, 42 percent were confused about it and 41 percent were opposed—a number that has been even higher in other polls.

No wonder. Republicans have sought to make health ...

South Africa: The Truth Teller

Joseph Lelyveld

As a matter of crude shorthand, the South African photographer David Goldblatt might be described as his country’s Walker Evans. Though Evans was one of Goldblatt’s models when he was starting out more than a half-century ago, the comparison at this point serves only to hint at the moral clarity of his vision, the seriousness of his purpose, and the scope of his achievement. It does not prepare you for the stirring experience that awaits you at the Jewish Museum, where a copious exhibition of his black-and-white work, mainly from the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties—the heyday of apartheid—will be on display through September 19.

Hide and Be Found

Mark Ford

It was “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” midway along the journey of our life, that Dante woke to find himself in a dark wood. Since the imaginary date of the opening of the The Divine Comedy is Good Friday 1300, and the poet was born in 1265, that makes him thirty-five, exactly halfway to the biblically approved span of a man’s life—though in fact, like most ...

The Most Happy Couple

Martin Filler

Her Majesty Victoria, by the Grace of God Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India, reigned over her worldwide dominions from 1837 to 1901. Christened Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent, she gave her second name to an age. In its adjectival form, it became a portmanteau term for a half-century’s worth of fussily ornate, historically eclectic architecture and design ...

The Shame of the World Cup

Tim Parks

For any practitioner of Zen who imagines he has achieved a state of detached equanimity, the ultimate test must be to watch his national side play at soccer’s World Cup. That England’s team is dull, I tell myself after the first game, I can handle; that they are truly dire, I reflect after the second and third, is perhaps only par for the course. When, in their first ...

Good-bye to Dubai

Joshua Hammer

In mid-May, with Dubai reeling from the effects of the global financial crisis, I flew into town and took a taxi down the Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai’s main thoroughfare, which runs parallel to the Persian Gulf. The evening rush hour had not ended, but the road was clear of traffic; during previous visits to Dubai I’d encountered gridlock day and night all along this highway. As we approached downtown Dubai, we ran a long gauntlet of illuminated skyscrapers, all built during the past few years. Covered with garish architectural flourishes, many were unfinished, with exposed steel girders and cranes frozen above them; almost all displayed TO LET signs in their windows.

The CIA and WMDs: The Damning Evidence

Fulton Armstrong, reply by Thomas Powers

The following letter, by a former US intelligence officer, was sent in response to Thomas Powers’s review of Robert Jervis’s Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War in the May 27 issue.

The New Challenge to Repressive Cuba

Daniel Wilkinson

For decades, the Castro government has been very effective in repressing dissent in Cuba by, among other things, preventing its critics from publishing or broadcasting their views on the island. Yet in recent years, the blogosphere has created an outlet for a new kind of political criticism that is harder to control. Can it make a difference?

The Beauty of a Hermetic, Corrupt World

Ruth Franklin

One of the characters in Ghostwritten, David Mitchell’s first novel, is a “noncorpum”: a disembodied spirit that travels the earth as a parasite on its human hosts. Restlessly seeking a clue to its own origin, it scours their consciousnesses, assimilates their knowledge and experiences as its own, and then transmigrates to another soul to repeat the process. It inhabits people’s bodies, speaks with their voices, and sometimes even ...

The Roberts Court vs. Free Speech

David Cole

On June 21, in one of its last decisions of the term, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment permits Congress to imprison human rights activists merely for advising militant organizations on ways to reject violence and pursue their disputes through lawful means. The Court’s decision is all the more disturbing when contrasted with its ruling in the Citizens United case earlier this year. In the Roberts Court’s world, corporations’ freedom to spend unlimited sums of money apparently deserves substantially greater protection than the freedom of human rights advocates to speak.

Righteous & Wrong

Malise Ruthven

Paul Berman’s The Flight of the Intellectuals elaborates on the theme of an embattled liberal civilization facing a totalitarian or fascist onslaught. The book points an accusing finger at two particular writers—Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton-Ash—whom Berman regards as exemplifying liberal intellectual pusillanimity. Berman, however, is not to be bothered by inconvenient truths that might arrest the flow of his rhetoric. His vision is crassly ideological: facts that might interfere with his argument are liable to be discarded or ignored.

‘The Food Movement, Rising’: An Exchange

Joel Berg, Ellen Finkelpearl, and Kevin Morgan, reply by Michael Pollan

To the Editors:

Michael Pollan inadvertently reveals the dangers of the local food movement when he extols its multiple benefits [“The Food Movement, Rising,” NYR, June 10]. In an otherwise excellent article, he claims that “the local food movement wants to decentralize the global economy, if not secede from it altogether.” As it stands, this argument carries two political dangers.

First, it comes perilously close to equating local food systems ...

‘The Tea Party Jacobins’: An Exchange

Elliot Turiel, Staughton Lynd, and David Jordan, reply by Mark Lilla

To the Editors:

I agree with so much that Mark Lilla says about American politics and the Tea Party phenomenon that it seems churlish to take issue with his evocation of the Jacobins for comparison [“The Tea Party Jacobins,” NYR, May 27]. Yet I think his analogy is misleading and inappropriate.

The Jacobins in the French Revolution were not homogeneous. There were the mindless and the meddlesome as well as ...

The Beats: Pictures of a Legend

Edmund White

Allen Ginsberg’s snapshots of friends—the subject of the exhibition at the National Gallery, Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg—are fascinating since few of them are well-known and they often show their subjects in their youth—a fresh-faced, toothy, nerdy Ginsberg, for instance, long before he became the bearded guru, and a melancholy, poetic William Burroughs before he became the saurian undertaker seen in familiar portraits. There’s even a shadowy nude of Burroughs in bed during the period when he and Ginsberg were lovers.

‘Why Has He Fallen Short?’

Frank Rich

The Obama of Hope and Change was too tough an act for Obama, a mere chief executive, to follow. Only Hollywood might have the power to create a superhero who could fulfill the messianic dreams kindled by his presence and rhetoric, maintain the riveting drama of his unlikely ascent, and sustain the national mood of deliverance that greeted his victory. As soon as Inauguration Day turned to night, the real Obama was destined to depreciate like the shiny new luxury car that starts to lose its book value the moment it’s driven off the lot.

Iraq: The Impasse

Joost Hiltermann

It is easy to underestimate how much fear can obstruct a society’s recovery from horrific violence or repression, or both; and fear now dominates Iraq as its leaders try to make a new start after decades of a ruthless tyranny, its violent removal, and the chaotic aftermath.

The Temptation of Elena Kagan

Ronald Dworkin

The Kagan hearings have been almost universally denounced as pointless and calls for reform have increased. It is important to review the hearings in some detail to consider how far that charge is justified and how confirmation hearings might be improved.

The Crisis & the Euro

George Soros

The situation is eerily reminiscent of the 1930s. Doubts about sovereign credit are forcing reductions in budget deficits at a time when the banking system and the economy may not be strong enough to do without fiscal and monetary stimulus. Keynes taught us that budget deficits are essential for countercyclical policies in times of deflation, yet governments everywhere feel compelled to reduce them under pressure from the financial markets.

The Worth of Warhol

Peter Gates

To the Editors:

Edward Hayes’s letter [NYR, May 13] falsely accusing the Warhol Foundation of undervaluing its inventory of Andy Warhol’s art to avoid meeting its obligation to distribute 5 percent of its assets annually to charity is a legacy of his disastrous lawsuit against his client, Andy Warhol’s estate, for an astonishing legal fee.

I was one of the attorneys opposing him in that lawsuit. He ...