From 'Summertime': 'Undated Fragments' By J.M. Coetzee
He goes with his father to Newlands because sport—rugby in winter, cricket in summer—is the strongest surviving bond between them, and because it went through his heart like a knife, the first Saturday after his return to the country, to see his father put on his coat and without a word go off to Newlands like a lonely child.
Land Divers By Claire Messud
Mummy had to try the key at least four times before it turned. And all that time, or some of that time, the burglar was in Mummy's bedroom. He'd come, as it were, from the inside.
Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood By Michael Chabon
People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity.
Advice to the Prince By David Bromwich
Barack Obama in Cairo took a path that was different in tone, in implication, and in many particulars. Not since John F. Kennedy's inaugural address has there been such a candid admission that the wrongs of a colonialism America has sometimes supported work against the ideals of American liberty.
The World Finance Crisis & the American Mission By Robert Skidelsky
The true roots of the current economic crisis lie in the privileging of the US dollar as the chief reserve currency during the Cold War—an arrangement that allowed the US to pursue an imperial mission that was greatly to the satisfaction of its partners and allies, but also led to huge macroeconomic imbalances. Until the US renounces this mission, it may be impossible to end them.
Holocaust: The Ignored Reality By Timothy Snyder
If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag—generally taken to be adequate or even final symbols of the evil of mass slaughter—we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today's Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.
Venice: The Masters in Boston By Andrew Butterfield
Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese painted alongside one another in Venice for thirty years. No other sixteenth-century Italian city could attract and nourish a triumvirate of great painters, or for so long a time.
Plus: Michael Greenberg on Gabriel García Márquez, Neal Ascherson on Rose Tremain, Tim Parks on Geoff Dyer, Paul Starr on Ronald Dworkin, and more.
