Mark O’Connell
Neglecting Beckett
James Marsh’s biopic Dance First runs into some predictable problems in adapting the life of a writer, especially one as recognizable as Samuel Beckett.
Accra Shepp
Those Who Stood Up
Photographs from Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment
Clair Wills, interviewed by Fintan O’Toole
Making Sense of the Missing
“Some people were allowed to belong in families and others weren’t.”
Yasmin El-Rifae
A View from Cairo
“Less often noted is the connection between Egypt’s repression of its citizens and Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The American-backed alliance between the two countries has never been accepted by the Egyptian people, who share a history of anti-imperialist struggle with their Palestinian neighbors. It is becoming ever clearer that there cannot be freedom for people on one side of Rafah and not the other.”
Free from the Archives
Three hundred and twenty-three years ago today the legendary privateer-cum-buccaneer Captain William Kidd was executed in London. In the Review’s January 29, 1987, issue, Christopher Hill wrote about the culture of pirating that flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—when trading empires relied on pirates (or their methods) to establish outposts and plunder goods—and waned around the time of Kidd’s trial, as governments and merchants came to depend on undisrupted exchange for their power.
Christopher Hill
Success Story
“Kidd was denounced as a pirate. By the time he returned to New York in 1699 the Whigs were losing control of Parliament and the Tories were looking for scandals with which to attack them. Kidd’s piracies, judiciously exaggerated by the East India Company, had become notorious. The company, always more sympathetic to Tories than to Whigs, wanted revenge, since they were blamed for Kidd’s depredations.”
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