Colonialism

There are other reasons beyond shortage of time (the acclaimed Indian novelist Anita Desai has just turned 87) to write a novella; the genre is as attractive and prestigious as it is fashionable. The deceptively slender format can briskly encompass whole worlds and histories, or alternatively, like the short story, depend on strict excisions and limitations for its effects. Rosarita does both. A young woman, Bonita, addressed as ‘you’ throughout, is taking time out from her Spanish-language studies and relaxing on a park bench in the historic centre of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Education has been her means of escape from the domineering family structure back in India that

The CIA, this fascinating new history notes, is ‘possibly the most infamous organisation on the planet’. Its hidden hand is often presumed to be everywhere, pulling the strings. That’s pretty impressive, given that it only has, by most estimates, around 20,000 employees. (The exact number is, naturally, classified.) At the same time, it’s routinely portrayed as comically inept – a bunch of ‘clowns’ and ‘a refuge for Ivy League intellectuals’, as Richard Nixon put it. This has led to a dichotomy in CIA histories. On the one hand it is depicted as an all-powerful evil force, responsible for many of the world’s ills since its foundation in 1947. On the

Call it a prejudice if you like. Living in Japan in the 1970s, I had a slight aversion to a particular type of westerner. He – for it was mostly a he – usually lived in Kyoto, sometimes wore a kimono and liked to sit in ancient temples chasing after that presumably blissful moment of enlightenment, awakening, satori, or whatever one wishes to call it. These seekers were less interested in Japan as a society of human beings. They wanted to float in higher spheres. As Christopher Harding explains in The Light of Asia, the Zen adepts, the Buddhist chanters, the rock-garden worshippers, the kimonoed fools (in my no doubt

Lauren Groff writes to alleviate her angst about aspects of life she finds hard to confront. Climatic disaster, misogyny, spousal death, flawed utopias and pandemics have all fuelled the plots of books as disparate as Fates and Furies, her 2015 contemporary two-hander about marital verisimilitude, and Matrix, which features a 12th-century feminist abbess based on the little-known poet Marie de France. Yet neither is a bleak read; indeed, Barack Obama selected Fates and Furies as his 2015 pick. Groff’s intoxicating 2018 story collection Florida threw the strains of motherhood into this mix: the mother in ‘Ghosts and Empties’ who laces her running shoes to pace the streets because she has

The first problem about decolonisation is the word itself. Colonisation is the process of establishing control over a foreign territory and its indigenous inhabitants, by settlement, conquest or political manipulation. But decolonisation? It has come to mean much more than the reversal of that process. Today, it refers to an altogether wider agenda, whose central objective is to discredit or downgrade the cultural achievements of the West. Objective truth and empirical investigation are mere western constructs. They are optional ideas which need have no weight beyond the western societies which invented them. But the West has imposed them on the rest of the world by a process akin to the

Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip to South Africa was cut short by the sudden emergence of Covid, to March last year. Blackburn had gone to Cape Town, and then into the dry interior, the Karoo, to explore the lost world she had found in an obscure volume that she had once chanced upon in the London Library. Specimens of Bushman Folklore, by the linguists Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, published in 1911, contains the texts – life stories, origin myths, tales about animals, accounts of murders of women and children by the encroaching colonists –

After 13 years in parliament, rising star Chris Patten had the bad luck to be one of the few Tory MPs to lose his seat in 1992. Had he been re-elected he would probably have become chancellor of the exchequer. Instead, he found himself in the wilderness. But not for long. Within months he had been appointed governor of Hong Kong, tasked with the tricky business of presiding over the transfer of the territory to communist China. It was a lucky break. Had he been chancellor, the odds are that his political career would have come to a sticky end the following September, when the pound fell out of the

It’s a bold writer who confronts a major historical moment such as a pandemic before it’s over, but Emily St. John Mandel has a claim to fictionalised outbreaks. Her 2014 novel Station Eleven presciently envisioned a devastating flu. That book was televised by HBO and became a major hit, and this latest touches on the same ground. As J.G. Ballard proved, revisiting a subject – as a painter might – can be a fertile approach in speculative fiction. Sea of Tranquility initially adopts a time-leaping structure reminiscent of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (which itself sprang from Italo Calvino’s masterpiece If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller). In 1912, we meet