Gazillions

Neal Ascherson: Organised Crime

“Karabas was gunned down in 1997. He and his mob had taken over the port city of Odessa as law and order disintegrated in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. One might call his reign a comprehensive protection racket. But, looked at in another way, Karabas became the only reliable source of authority and social discipline. He arbitrated the city’s commercial disputes (10 per cent of net profits was his price); he kept the drug peddlers to one area of Odessa, and prevented the horrific people-smuggling in the harbour district from infecting the rest of the town. Using a bare minimum of thuggery, he kept the peace. Karabas seldom carried a gun. Everyone looked up to him, and levels of violence stayed lower in Odessa than in other Russian and Ukrainian cities. His murderers were probably Chechens hired to break Odessa’s grip on the local oil industry, a grip coveted by Ukraine’s then president, Leonid Kuchma, who ‘during his ten years in power . . . presided over the total criminalisation of the Ukrainian government and civil service’.” [ read more . . . ]

An Element of Unfairness

Ross McKibbin on the Great Education Disaster

“The modern history of English secondary education begins with the 1944 Education Act, usually known as the Butler Act. It was, for better and worse, the most important piece of education legislation of the 20th century, but was expected to reform an educational system already deeply divisive and inequitable. In some ways it promoted the hopes of wartime democracy; in others it betrayed them. It raised the school-leaving age to 15 and made secondary education universal and free. It equalised the payment of teachers in all state secondary schools and devised procedures by which nearly all the religious elementary schools were incorporated into the state system. It didn’t specify what kind of secondary education local authorities should establish, and as a result they fell back on what already existed and what conventional opinion thought appropriate: grammar schools for the academically inclined, junior technical schools for those with superior technical aptitudes and secondary moderns for those of a ‘practical’ turn of mind.” [ read more . . . ]

Kick over the Scenery

Stephen Burt on Philip K. Dick

“When an art form or genre once dismissed as kids’ stuff starts to get taken seriously by gatekeepers – by journals, for example, such as the one you are reading now – respect doesn’t come smoothly, or all at once. Often one artist gets lifted above the rest, his principal works exalted for qualities that other works of the same kind seem not to possess. Later on, the quondam genius looks, if no less talented, less solitary: first among equals, or maybe just first past the post. That is what happened to rock music in the late 1960s, when sophisticated critics decided, as Richard Poirier put it, to start ‘learning from the Beatles’. It is what happened to comics, too, in the early 1990s, when the Pulitzer Prize committee invented an award for Art Spiegelman’s Maus. And it has happened to science fiction, where the anointed author is Philip K. Dick.” [ read more . . . ]

Diary

Jenny Diski: On Not Liking South Africa

“The ‘you can’t understand until you’ve lived there’ argument had kept me from visiting South Africa quite effectively. If being there would make me understanding of apartheid, I preferred to stay away. But now it had to be a very different place, 18 years after Nelson Mandela walked free from prison, 14 years on from the day when South Africa had its first democratic election. I was going to be there anyway – Cape Town was the end point of another journey – and I thought I’d spend a couple of weeks and look around; be a regular tourist in a place where minds had been changed.” [ read more . . . ]

At the Movies

Michael Wood on David Lean

Short Cuts

Daniel Soar: David Davis v. Miss Great Britain

Letters from Herbert F. Solow, Mark Engel, Paul Lindsey, Manjushree Thapa, Charles Bernstein, Paul Brassley, Paul Titchmarsh, Alistair Watson, Editors, ‘London Review’

Registered subscribers to the print edition of the LRB can also read the following:

John Elliott: When Columbus Met the Natives
Eliot Weinberger: A Tale of Two Candidates
Uri Avnery: Controversy at the Aipac Conference
Terry Castle: Maude Hutchins’s Revenge
Tobias Gregory: 21st-Century Noir
Clair Wills on Modern Irish History
Ruth Scurr: Marie Antoinette’s Daughter
Peter Campbell on Gustav Klimt
John Whitfield: The End of the Coral Reef?
Poems by Steven Heighton, John Hartley Williams

For more information see the contents page.