Hiroshima
In search of kindred spirits: An Absence of Cousins, by Lore Segal, reviewed
When Ilka Weisz, a young refugee from Vienna, accepts a teaching post in smalltown Connecticut, she struggles to make friends in the close-knit academic community
Richard Flanagan rails against wrongs ‘too vast to have a name’
‘Why do we do what we do to each other?’ he asks, citing among many atrocities the dropping of the atom bomb and the genocide of aboriginal Tasmanians
The power of the translator to break nations
No one ever raised a statue to a translator, disgruntled adepts of that art sometimes complain. I beg to differ,…
Japanese puzzle: how can an advanced, dynamic country function with such an ancient population?
When Japan hosts the Rugby Union World Cup next year, and still more so the summer Olympics in 2020, all…
If the bombing of Hiroshima was a moral obscenity, blame Emperor Hirohito
The 70th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has produced some predictable wailing and gnashing of teeth about the horrors of…
All that postwar anxiety about being vaporised by a nuclear bomb was a complete waste of emotion
When I was growing up in the 1970s, my three main fears were: being blown up by the IRA; being…
Why are we so silent over Hiroshima?
It’s 70 years since the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and yet there has been no rush to…
Even those who reviled Thatcher will be moved, appalled and astonished: Dead Sheep at the Park reviewed
Dead Sheep is a curious dramatic half-breed that examines Geoffrey Howe’s troubled relationship with Margaret Thatcher. Structurally it’s a Mexican…
In the heart of darkness, the atom bomb
At the dark heart of this dark book is a startling fact: Joseph Conrad was employed to steam up the…
