It seemed that the brightest spark in Africa had been snuffed when the news came through of he Tanganyika-Zanzibar anschluss. But it is now possible to be somewhat more sanguine. First, the past.

footnote ＊ Sociological theories may be grouped around two poles. The first presents us with a view of society as a network of human meanings as embodiments of human activity. The second, on the other ...

Ihave been reading Perry Anderson’s descriptions of the state we are in, and his efforts to discover the whys and wherefores of that state—its origins, as he unrepentantly puts it—for thirty-five ...

The death of Edward Thompson on 28 August takes from us the most eloquent voice on the British Left, a historian who transformed his craft, a writer of some of the best English prose of the twentieth ...

There could hardly be an author we know more about than Thomas Mann. Time and again, it’s true, hints of some still unplumbed darkness glimmer through the biographies and interpretations, a sense of ...

Which brings me to that disgraceful ‘like’. It was, obviously, shorthand for something more complicated, on which I have so often insisted, from Signs Taken for Wonders on, that I have become ...

On South Korea.

Erich Fried was not only a distinguished and prolific poet—he said once in a characteristic phrase that he wrote poems the way rabbits have babies—but a novelist, essayist and translator of ...

in “revolution”, Edward Thompson wrote, “that the point of breakthrough is not a narrow political concept; it will entail a confrontation throughout society between two systems, two ways of life. In ...

In 1968, Perry Anderson drew attention to the bizarre role and status of literary criticism in the ‘national culture’; in a context in which the social sciences and historical disciplines were ...

In 2010, at the height of the Congress government’s counterinsurgency operation against India’s Maoists, Alpa Shah set off on a seven-night trek with a Naxalite guerrilla platoon, disguised as one of ...

Over the last decade the fate of Cambodia has come to symbolize some of the most extreme and controversial aspects of twentieth-century history: mass bombing, by the United States in 1973 especially; ...