The 1948 Italian neorealist film "Germany Year Zero" is about a German family surviving in bombed-out Berlin, the capital of a defeated and humiliated nation: a young woman who goes out with Allied soldiers, steals cigarettes and sells them, a young man who is hiding from the police because he is...
"Buruma, who was born in the Netherlands in 1951 and has lived mostly abroad since 1975, is less interested in the details of the killing than in what followed: the ideologies vindicated or discredited, the prejudices revealed and the doubts cast on the workability of what only 10 years ago was c...
هذا الكتاب غربي المزاج والهوى إلى أبعد حد، وهو يتناول مفهوم الاستغراب بأنه "الحركة المعادية للغرب"، وخلاصته أن من يُعادون الغرب إنما يفعلون ذلك لأسباب خاصة بهم وليست كردود فعل على ما قد يكون الغرب اقترفه من جرائم وخطايا، يقول المؤلفان: "ما ندعوه بالاستغراب هو تلك الصورة التي رسمها للغرب أعداؤه، و...
Ian Buruma has been one of my favorite contemporary public intellectuals with the likes of Christopher Hitchens, and Milan Kundera. He has a vast array of knowledge from Asia (he has lived in Japan and China and speaks both languages fluently), he is of Dutch and English ancestry (essentially he ...
He has just saved dozens of French aristocrats from Robespierre’s Terror by smuggling them to England, the Island of Liberty. On the boat, gazing at the cliffs of Dover as though witness to a revelation, Leslie Howard speaks the last words of the film to his French wife, played by Merle Oberon: “...
Who knows why? But it had become a tradition. In the year 1942 it happened to fall on March 8. I never cared much for Harbin, with its Russian Orthodox churches, horse carriages, and beggars. Harbin was a treacherous place. One always felt spied upon. The one-eyed Greek, skulking in the lobby of ...
Operation Market-Garden, costing thousands of young lives, went ahead anyway. “Monty” wanted to outshine his American rival, General George Patton, no matter what. A little more than six months later, already disillusioned by the arrogant stupidity of his own side, Urquhart was among the first Al...
Fortunately my name wasn’t mentioned. I’m still living at home, thank you very much, and hope to keep it that way. THEO VAN GOGH, SPEAKING ON LOCATION WHILE MAKING HIS LAST FILM, 06/05 1. On the morning that Theo van Gogh was shot, he was cycling toward his office in the south of Amsterdam to do ...
For we are God. —MAX BECKMANN, 19271 MAX BECKMANN WAS born in 1884 in Leipzig, and died on December 27, 1950, in New York City. He was, I think, the greatest painter to emerge from the brief but extraordinary artistic big bang of Weimar Germany. If he is less famous than some more sensational fig...