-
Nov 23, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Nicholas Hellen |Peter Conradi |Jeremy Harding |in Djon
It was the morning after the first heavy snowfall of the season but the trams of Dijon were running every three to four minutes regardless. During Friday’s rush hour, the purple carriages glided effortlessly through the historic capital of Burgundy, eastern France. “The tram just works. Personally, I have never come across any problems due to bad weather,” said Eric Florence, who takes the T2, the second of the city’s two tram lines, from his home for the four-mile journey to work at a bank.
-
Nov 21, 2024 | 
internazionale.it | Jeremy Harding
Binyavanga Wainaina diventò una celebrità della letteratura africana nel 2005, quando la rivista britannica Granta pubblicò la sua serie di istruzioni per scrittori di viaggio, giornalisti e operatori umanitari nell’articolo “Come scrivere d’Africa” (Internazionale 630). “Assicuratevi di dare l’impressione che senza il vostro intervento l’Africa sarebbe spacciata”, scriveva.
-
Oct 23, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Jeremy Harding |Thomas Jones
Your browser does not support the audio element. In the latest issue of the LRB, Jeremy Harding reviews How to Write about Africa, a posthumous collection of essays and stories by Binyavanga Wainaina, one of postcolonial Africa’s great anglophone satirists.
-
Oct 16, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Binyavanga Wainaina |Jeremy Harding
Binyavanga Wainaina became an African literary celebrity in 2005, when Granta published his instructions for travel writers, journalists and aid workers on ‘how to write about Africa’. ‘Be sure to leave the impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed,’ he wrote.
-
Jul 7, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Jeremy Harding
Relief, renewed anxiety, several surprises. These are the mixed feelings of a country that voted down the Rassemblement National on Sunday. As the blog’s unreliable narrator on France, I’ve presented readers with poll predictions in earlier posts that turned out to be wide of the mark. That Marine Le Pen’s party would come in third, as it has, behind the Nouveau Front Populaire and Macron’s Ensemble alliance, was a long shot.
-
Jun 30, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Jeremy Harding
Marine Le Pen has been working for years to build a credible position for her party, the Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National), in respectable right-wing nativism. With its success in the European elections and Macron’s dissolution of the French parliament, the RN may at last be a party of government.
-
Jun 26, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Jeremy Harding
On 27 May, Emmanuel Macron tweeted his outrage at the Israeli bombing of a tent encampment in Rafah that left at least 45 civilians dead. ‘These operations must stop,’ he wrote. ‘There are no safe areas in Rafah for Palestinian civilians.
-
Jun 11, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Jeremy Harding
In last week’s elections, the European parliament withstood an energetic onslaught by the far right. The centre-right European People’s Party remains the largest group and resembles a large, inert object whose surface was scuffed, but not disfigured, by the vote. The Socialists and Democrats have held their shape with around 140 seats. Renew Europe, with which Emmanuel Macron’s party is associated, has taken a predictable hit, losing around twenty of its 102 seats.
-
May 31, 2024 | 
scroll.in | Jeremy Harding
When I started out as a journalist, I had the makings of a very poor one. The pieces I turned in didn’t tell proper stories with a beginning, a middle and an end. And I guess – thinking back – they were light on information, even when they were a bit like field reports, about incidents or events. This began to change when I was asked to write by more challenging editors. I remember when it happened. I’d been travelling on the rebel side during the war in Eritrea.
-
May 15, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Jeremy Harding
Awoman waits in a bare room for a meeting with her lover, who has been detained as an anti-colonial agitator. He is escorted from the cells by a Portuguese plain-clothes officer. This is Angola, sometime in the 1960s. The couple embrace; he asks for news of their children. Waiting outside, the security man overhears the woman promise to bring the prisoner a ‘full suit’ on her next visit. He reports this to his superior, sealing the prisoner’s fate.
