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Edward Said Memorial Concert As a tribute to the life and work of Edward Said, the London Review of Books has invited the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra under their conductor Daniel Barenboim to give a concert at the Barbican Hall in London on August 4th. The Orchestra was set up by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim with the aim of giving young Arabs and Israelis the chance to work and perform together and to learn from some of the world’s best orchestral musicians. Their concert in London will be the high point of their summer tour this year. For more information and to book tickets, click here
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Preview of the next issue (Vol. 26 No. 11)

Stand-Off in Taiwan
Perry Anderson on Greens v. Blues in the South China Sea

"Whatever the short-term eventualities, the long-term prospects of China ever accepting a breakaway of Taiwan seem small. From the standpoint of the nation-state, for a former province without ethnic difference from the majority population to attempt independence is secession. So far, no nation-state has ever permitted this. Freely to accept the independence of Taiwan would, in the eyes of the central government, be to invite a dynamic of disintegration along Yugoslav lines." [ read more . . . ]

These articles from the next issue will also be online from 3 June:
Michael Wood: García Márquez tells his story | Andrew O'Hagan reads some lad mags | Yitzhak Laor on Israeli militarism | Peter Campbell: Deep holes and narrow tracks at Paddington | Thomas Jones on the life expectancy of a Roman emperor

From the current issue

Vol. 26 No. 10 :: 20 May 2004

The Mourning Paper
David Simpson on war and showing pictures of the dead

"Back in November 2003, Sergeant Georg Andreas Pogorny faced the possibility of being court-martialled for cowardice after he'd panicked at the sight of an Iraqi cut in half by machine-gun fire. Pogorny was overcome with what he described as 'an overwhelming sense of my own mortality'. The most troubling implication of this story is that it appears to be untypical. Few of us in the homeland are given any materials for imagining ourselves in the place and body of the other, a place where in so many ways we already are: this is the real symmetry between 9/11 then and Iraq today." [ read more . . . ]

The Slightest Sardine
James Wood on a literary dragnet

The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. XII: 1960-2000: The Last of England? by Randall Stevenson

"Stevenson's book is, it should be said in fairness, a massive gathering of painful erudition. He is like Denys the Alexandrian, who in Flaubert's account received orders from heaven to read every book in the world. His head must be dizzy with the minor works of Julian Mitchell and Francis King and Brian Patten and Maureen Duffy. His sleep must have been poisoned for years by worries about properly dating Piers Paul Read's A Married Man. It is . . . a disaster to fill a book like this with storms of names and endless lists; narrative gets shouted down by the encyclopedic." [ read more . . . ]

Law v. Order
Neal Ascherson: Putin's strategy

Inside Putin's Russia by Andrew Jack

Putin's Progress by Peter Truscott

Putin, Russia's Choice by Richard Sakwa

"Where is legality, as we understand it, when it is considered perfectly normal for the police and public prosecution staff to break into a defence lawyer's office during a trial and seize all his files on his client - as happened last October in the case of Platon Lebedev of the Yukos oil corporation? Those who try to justify this sort of thing have to fall back on an argument which is venerable, brutal, dangerous and yet not to be dismissed out of hand. The argument is that legality is not an adequate weapon against those whose power is itself illegitimate, and who consider themselves above the law." [ read more . . . ]

Plus

Short Cuts
Thomas Jones on aristocrats

At the Serpentine
Paul Myerscough on Cy Twombly

Letters from  Nicholas Blanton,  Peter Dailey,  Phil Edwards,  W.G. Runciman,  Wilfred Beckerman,  Gerald Field

Table of Contents