Russian troops in Crimea This is not my usual blog post. Instead it’s in the form of a letter that I sent to the UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague, today, 23 March. I wrote the letter because I want to shed some light on the vast dangers and risks of the next stage of the […]
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Time for more than sanctions and words
London, 17 March 2014 It is 24 hours since the “result” of the referendum in Crimea. There was no surprise there, and today the region was recognised as independent by the Russian state. The result in Brussels and Washington and London has been somewhat different. The consequence of everything Western politicians have said […]
Timid western politics won’t wash with Putin
New Statesman, 14-20 March 2014 The first Ukrainian I met was called Peter. On my first visit to Kyiv, exactly 20 years ago, Peter introduced himself to me in front of the monument to the 150,000 massacred Jews of Babi Yar. He was a retired accountant from Croydon, but had been born outside Kharkiv, […]
Rebirth of a nation
Bullied and humiliated by Russia, seen as a strategic buffer by the US, Ukraine is riven by corruption and deeply divided. Can it rise and free itself?
In dreams
CIRCUS BULGARIA by Deyan Enev Times Literary Supplement, 24 December 2010 The stories in Deyan Enev’s Circus Bulgaria bristle with life’s illogic. Wild, lawless and sad-funny, they are a kind of continuous discourse on the amorality and unknowability of life. A couple who live in a regime that forbids relationships are mortally stung by a […]
From one uncertainty to another
Orientations: an Anthology of East European Travel Writing, ca.1550–2000 Under Eastern Eyes: a Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe A Bibliography of East European Travel Writing on Europe / edited by Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis Times Literary Supplement, 3 June 2011 “Little do ye know your own blessedness,” Robert Louis Stevenson […]
A brief history of intercultural awareness
International Translation Day took place at London’s Free Word Centre last week. It was a fascinating happening, interpreting translation and its values – its ability to represent the world, its power to revitalise, regenerate, teach, exercise, enthuse, convey one apex of language into another – from plenty of angles. There was a touch of interlocking […]
Europe’s self-view is changing
I’ve just finished a piece for Prospect about how European literature is changing: how it’s been changing since the Berlin Wall came down, but because deep change is so slow we’re only just becoming aware that there is a redistribution of literary priorities occurring. It is, as all the best changes are, ahead of the […]
The art of the Kraft
25 years of the most influential group in electronic pop The Guardian, 26 February 1997 Frieze, December 1997 I Like an indefinitely extended version of John Cage’s notorious composition 4’33”, there has been silence from the Kling Klang recording studio in Düsseldorf for the last six years, although we may assume that Ralf Hütter and […]
F Scott Fitzgerald rediscovered
In 1924 in a series of pieces for an American magazine, Motor, F Scott Fitzgerald described a 1200-mile journey he took with his wife Zelda from Connecticut to Alabama in a clapped-out automobile he named the ‘Rolling Junk’. Never published before in the UK, The Cruise of the Rolling Junk is a free-ranging comic alternation […]
