Christopher Silvester

1 month ago | engelsbergideas.com | Christopher Silvester

In Hollywoodgate, Egyptian director Ibrahim Nash’at, takes a fly-on-the-wall approach to observe what the Taliban did with some of the $7 billion of military hardware left behind by the Americans when they scrambled to withdraw from Afghanistan in August 2021. (You can watch Hollywoodgate on the BBC iPlayer.)To get the misleading title of Nash’at’s film out of the way, it is named after ‘Hollywood Gate 1’, the entrance to the Kabul Airbase, where much of the narrative unfolds.

Nov 3, 2024 | engelsbergideas.com | Christopher Silvester

The Forever War, Nick Bryant, Bloomsbury Continuum, £25In the wake of the riots that took place in Britain during this summer, Elon Musk trolled the United Kingdom with a post on X saying that civil war was inevitable. In the United States a recent YouGov survey found that 84 per cent of US voters said America was more divided than ten years ago and more than a quarter said that civil war could break out after this year’s presidential election.

Jun 25, 2024 | engelsbergideas.com | Christopher Silvester

A Nasty Little War: The West’s Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution, Anna Reid, John Murray, £25There was no official military history of this forgotten conflict and no campaign medals were issued to its British participants.

Apr 22, 2024 | engelsbergideas.com | Christopher Silvester

Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher – Television, Foster Hirsch, Knopf, £25Hollywood in the 1950s has had a bad press. Compared to earlier decades, its films have been dismissed as dull and insipid, its creative urges supposedly stifled by the conformity of Eisenhower’s America. Foster Hirsch, a professor of film at Brooklyn College, New York, begs to differ.

Mar 20, 2024 | spectator.com.au | Christopher Silvester

The Ku Klux Klan: An American History The History Press, pp.432, 20 This is the first history of the Ku Klux Klan from ‘its origins in post-Civil War Tennessee to the present day’ and it makes for a lively read. Kristofer Allerfeldt, a history professor at the University of Exeter, combines lucid political analysis with eye-popping details of violence. One victim of a lynching was made to climb a tree with a noose round his neck but stubbornly clung onto a branch.